BR  125  . G728  1923 

Gray,  Joseph  M.  M. ,  1877- 

An  adventure  in  orthodoxy 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/adventureinorthoOOgray 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


THE  OLD  FAITH  IN  THE  NEW  DAY 
THE  CONTEMPORARY  CHRIST 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN 

ORTHODOXY 


By  */ 

JOSEPH  M.  M.  GRAY 


THE  ABINGDON  PRESS 
NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1923,  by 
JOSEPH  M.  M.  GRAY 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

Preface .  7 

I.  The  Commonwealth  versus 

Christianity .  9 

II.  The  Rediscovery  of  Religion.  .  .  34 

III.  The  Return  to  Theology .  57 

IV.  The  Adventure  of  Orthodoxy  .  .  85 

V.  Through  Credence  to  Creed.  . .  113 


PREFACE 


One  of  the  happiest  contributions  to  the 
discussion  gathering  around  the  present  con¬ 
flict  of  conservatism  and  radicalism  was  that 
made  by  Mrs.  Katherine  Fullerton  Gerould  in 
an  essay  on  “The  ^Esthetics  of  Conservatism.”'1 
In  it  she  remarked  that  the  conservative  always 
goes  under,  but  conservatism  always  remains 
alive;  the  reason  being  that  radicalism  is  a 
gesture  of  attack,  which  is  always  ugly,  while 
conservatism  is  a  gesture  of  defense,  which  is 
always  graceful  and  pleasing.  “The  conserv¬ 
ing  attitude  is  an  attitude  of  love — though  it 
may  hit  upon  the  wrong  things  to  love;  while 
the  radical  mood  is  ...  a  mood  of  hatred — 
though  it  may  hit  on  the  right  things  to  hate.” 

The  author  of  the  present  unassuming 
volume  counts  himself  among  those  who  are 
called  progressive  because  of  their  attitude 
toward  religion  in  its  relation  to  modern  science, 
and  its  practical  application  to  the  social  order. 
But  he  has  seemed  to  observe  in  some  of  his 
comrades  of  progress  a  tendency  to  disregard 
those  durable  realities  of  thought  and  experience 
which  the  discipline  of  Time  has  confirmed  but 


1  The  Atlantic  Monthly,  July,  1922. 

7 


PREFACE 


has  not  exhausted,  and  without  which  conserv¬ 
atism  and  radicalism  alike  can  be  but  words 
in  the  air.  It  is  in  the  hope  of  helping  in  some 
way,  however  small,  to  maintain  that  sound 
appreciation  of  the  conservative  spirit,  so  neces¬ 
sary  if  progressivism  is  not  to  lose  balance  or 
direction,  that  he  has  committed  to  print  the 
chapters  which  follow. 

The  references  in  footnotes  serve  to  indicate 
not,  as  might  be  supposed,  a  parade  of  bibliog¬ 
raphy  quite  out  of  place  in  such  a  volume,  but 
simply  that  the  requirements  of  the  copyright 
law  have  been  met;  which  could  not  otherwise 
have  been  done  except  by  sacrificing  the  stim¬ 
ulus  to  be  gotten  from  contact  with  other  minds 
through  direct  quotation. 

J.  M.  M.  G. 

Elm  Park  Parsonage, 

Scranton,  Pennsylvania. 


CHAPTER  I 


THE  COMMONWEALTH  VERSUS 
CHRISTIANITY 

I 

Since  the  pistol  shot  at  Sarajevo  we  have 
been  searching  for  a  name  with  which  to  label 
our  tumultuous  day.  To  call  it  an  age  of  tran¬ 
sition  would  doubtless  be  accurate,  but  it  would 
not  be  distinctive,  for  every  age  is  an  age  of 
transition.  Even  those  which  seem  to  be 
undisturbed  and  quiet  are  constantly  modified 
by  unrecorded  fermentations  of  thought,  uncon¬ 
fessed  gropings  of  faith,  unpublished  expan¬ 
sions  of  curiosity.  In  the  years  which  lie 
immediately  behind  us  the  energies  of  change 
were  present  and  effective.  Looking  back  upon 
the  period  just  preceding  1914,  we  seem  to  see 
it  as  a  time  of  placid  and  happy  monotony. 
The  last  lands  hitherto  unknown  had  been 
opened  to  common  knowledge.  Forbidden 
Tibet  had  been  entered,  railroads  were  pene¬ 
trating  the  jungles  of  Africa  and,  crossing 
Siberian  wastes,  had  put  a  girdle  around  the 
globe.  Intrepid  men  had  won  the  long  battle 
with  the  arctic  regions,  and  past  the  ice-bound 

9 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


graves  of  their  predecessors  who  had  failed,  had 
marched  to  the  conquest  of  the  poles,  Inter¬ 
national  associations  for  peace,  symbolized  in 
the  Hague  Tribunal,  with  their  enthusiasm, 
their  fine  contacts,  their  prophetic  optimism, 
solemnly  assured  us  that  the  last  great  military 
conflict  had  been  fought.  In  a  word,  explora¬ 
tion  and  war,  two  of  the  great,  if  not  the 
greatest,  historic  occasions  of  social  change, 
had  been  removed.  The  organized  life  of  men 
had  been  set  into  permanent  molds.  Civili¬ 
zation  was  now  a  sure  and  definite  order. 
Education,  politics,  industry,  religion  were 
clearly  projected.  There  would  be  modifica¬ 
tions  as  time  passed,  modifications  wrought 
by  new  knowledge  and  the  progress  of  expe¬ 
rience,  but  they  would  be  additions  to  a  deter¬ 
mined  order,  the  character  of  which  and,  broadly 
speaking,  the  course  of  which,  were  fixed.  So 
men  thought,  and  where  they  did  not  reach 
so  clearly  discriminated  a  conclusion,  so  they 
felt.  It  is  thus,  quiet,  comfortable,  undis¬ 
turbed,  those  years  seem  now  to  have  been,  as 
we  look  back  upon  them  across  even  so  short  a 
distance  as  a  decade,  cut  sharply  off  by  the 
gigantic  chasm  of  the  war. 

But  we  know  now  that  those  dull-looking 
years,  though  we  did  not  at  the  time  suspect 
it,  were  alive  with  the  most  productive  ener- 

10 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 

gies.  We  know  that  underneath  their  quiet 
surface  tumultuous  and  terrible  things  were 
generating  and  that  the  day  in  which  we  live 
is  not  an  epoch  isolated  from  all  that  has  gone 
before  it,  but  is  the  flower  and  fruitage  of  tran¬ 
sitions  which  were  then  inexorably  proceeding. 
Men  and  women  pursued  their  common  ways 
of  custom,  thinking  small  thoughts,  living  small 
lives,  satisfied  with  the  immediate  and  un¬ 
awakened  toward  the  future,  while  Columbus 
sailed  to  the  discovery  of  a  new  world,  while 
gunpowder  was  undermining  the  feudalism  of 
a  thousand  years,  while  Wycliffe  and  Hus  and 
a  hundred  other  unremembered  heroes  were 
preparing  for  the  Luther  who  was  to  be,  while 
the  extravagances  of  kings  and  the  miseries  of 
serfs  were  kindling  the  flame  that  consumed 
the  French  Empire.  So  men  and  women 
pursued  their  common  ways  of  custom,  think¬ 
ing  small  thoughts,  living  small  lives,  satisfied 
with  the  immediate  and  unawakened  toward 
the  future,  while  philosophies,  diplomacies, 
industries,  racial  hates  and  age-long  injustices 
were  seething  toward  the  catastrophe  of  1914. 
The  energies  of  change  may  ferment  unper¬ 
ceived,  but  the  result  cannot  be  hid.  Soon  or 
late  it  rises  above  the  surface  of  experience  and 
vision,  a  blossom  or  a  burst,  a  development  or 
a  revolution.  After  the  dull  years,  there  buds 

11 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


and  flowers  the  magnificence  of  the  Renais¬ 
sance  with  new  worlds  discovered,  new  ideals 
disclosed,  new  liberties  attempted,  new  crea¬ 
tions  of  the  human  spirit.  After  the  tedium  of 
sterile  churchmanship  sweeps  in  the  Refor¬ 
mation  with  its  rebirth  of  faith,  its  impulse  to 
independence,  its  beginnings  of  nationality,  its 
tragedies  and  hopes.  After  the  deadly  mono- 
tones  of  arrogance,  extravagance,  and  misery, 
explode  the  splendor  and  the  terror  of  the 
French  Revolution.  After  the  serene  and 
comfortable  years  to  which  we  look  back,  comes 
the  day  in  which  we  now  are  living,  with  intel¬ 
lectual  outlooks  as  significant  as  the  Renais¬ 
sance,  with  spiritual  implications  as  vital  as  the 
Reformation,  with  political  and  social  changes 
as  productive  and  perilous  as  the  French  Revo¬ 
lution. 

To  fix  upon  a  single  word  with  which  to 
capture  and  express  the  characteristic  meaning 
and  quality  of  our  age  is  impossible.  What 
Henry  van  Dyke,  writing  twenty-five  years 
ago,  said  of  the  generation  to  which  he  was 
addressing  himself,  can  be  applied  equally  well 
to  our  day.  “From  the  material  side  we  might 
call  it  an  age  of  progress;  from  the  intellectual 
side,  an  age  of  science;  from  the  medical  side, 
an  age  of  hysteria;  from  the  political  side,  an 
age  of  democracy;  from  the  commercial  side,  an 

12 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


age  of  advertisement;  from  the  social  side,  an 
age  of  publicomania.”1  Even  then  the  full 
meaning  of  the  times  would  not  be  expressed. 
But  from  whatever  side  one  views  it,  or  with 
how  inadequate  an  observation,  there  is  no 
aspect  of  it  with  which  religion  has  not  to  do. 
From  every  area  and  interest  of  the  day  religion 
is  being  challenged,  criticized,  threatened,  ex¬ 
plored,  so  that  one  might  very  accurately 
suggest  the  concern  of  religion  with  contem¬ 
porary  life  in  the  phraseology  of  the  courts. 
The  Commonwealth  versus  Christianity. 

This  is  without  doubt  the  most  deep-lying 
and  important  feature  of  the  present  age.  It 
is  saturated  with  religious  interest.  It  is 
vibrant  with  religious  reactions.  It  is  “eager 
for  the  things  by  which  men  live.”  But  it  is 
seriously  and  painfully  confused  in  respect  of 
religion  and  religious  values.  Among  several 
reasons,  one  surely  is  that  we  are  too  close  to 
our  own  time  to  see  it  and  its  events  in  proper 
perspective.  One  may  stand  in  front  of  a 
frail  and  mean  cabin  a  few  feet  high  and  be 
unable  to  see  the  mountain  to  which  it  clings, 
sloping  up  to  the  enduring  snows.  We  are 
standing  so  close  to  our  human  structures,  our 
institutions  and  machines  and  books  and  wars, 


1  Reprinted  by  permission  of  The  Macmillan  Company  from  Van  Dyke: 
Gospel  for  an  Age  of  Doubt,  p.  6. 

13 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


that  we  easily  miss  the  ranges  of  eternal  reality 
which  rise  beyond.  Edward  Mortimer  Chap¬ 
man  has  written  of  the  historian  Froude  and 
his  keen  interest  in  religion  and  ethics,  that  he 
always  saw  the  pillar  of  cloud  and  fire  so  near 
as  to  find  himself  either  befogged  or  daunted — 
which  will  describe  a  multitude  of  earnest  men 
and  women  to-day  as  they  try  to  take  account 
of  the  age  and  the  changes  which  seem  to 
threaten  religion. 

Of  course,  when  one  speaks  of  religion  in  this 
wise,  it  is  Christianity  which  is  involved.  One 
of  the  more  profound  comments  of  recent  times, 
quite  contrary  to  much  of  the  inference  drawn 
from  the  lately  developed  comparative  study 
of  religions,  reminds  us  that  Christianity  is  not 
a  religion,  but  that  it  is  religion  itself.  It  has 
to  do  with  all  life  because  it  is  the  stuff  of  life. 
A  remark  like  that  indicates  very  sharply  and 
unmistakably  the  position  and  function  of  the 
church.  The  church  must  react  to  life,  not  to 
be  conformed  to  it  but  to  be  intelligible  to  it. 
The  church’s  language  must  change  with  the 
changing  speech  of  men.  Its  institutions  must 
alter  to  meet  the  altering  occasions  of  a  living 
world.  But  it  is  religion,  itself  unchanged, 
which,  through  the  church’s  changing  channels, 
must  reach,  refresh,  regenerate  the  life  of  man. 
There  is  perhaps  no  finer  expression  of  this 

14 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


truth  than  in  Tennyson’s  description  of  the 
Lady  of  the  Lake.  He  is  describing  the  gate 
to  the  city  of  Camelot,  of  which  there  was  no 
gate  like  it  under  heaven: 

“For  barefoot  on  the  keystone,  which  was  lined 
And  rippled  like  an  ever-fleeting  wave. 

The  Lady  of  the  Lake  stood :  all  her  dress 
Wept  from  her  sides  as  water  flowing  away; 

But  like  the  cross  her  great  and  goodly  arms 
Stretched  under  all  the  cornice  and  upheld.” 

It  is  a  picture,  as  one  of  the  most  penetrating 
of  students  has  said,  of  the  power  of  religion 
sustaining  the  structure  of  society.  The 
church’s  forms  are  always  changing  and  flowing 
like  water,  but  its  arms  are  stretched  out 
immovable,  like  the  cross. 

Reading  this  allegory  of  Tennyson’s,  or 
thinking  of  religion  in  any  other  terms,  we  have 
to  be  very  careful  rightly  to  discriminate  the 
significance  of  the  church  as  the  organized  form 
of  religion.  There  is  a  consoling  appeal  in  this 
conception  of  its  immovable  arms  underneath 
the  fabric  of  society  and  life,  but  the  essential 
note  is  not  that  of  immobility  but  that  of  sus¬ 
taining  power.  Its  value  lies  Jn  its  service¬ 
ableness,  not  its  rigidity;  and  it  is  from  that 
point  of  view  that  serious  minds  must  look 
out — and,  indeed,  are  looking  out — upon  the 
present  day,  to  discern  the  characteristic  forces 

15 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


and  conditions  amid  which  religion  and  the 
church  are  called  to  serve. 

It  goes  without  saying  that  different  minds, 
observing  the  contemporary  scene,  will  not 
reach  immediate  unanimity  in  their  discrimi¬ 
nation  of  its  essential  and  prominent  features. 
Across  the  experience  and  thinking  of  our  time 
have  swept  the  illuminating  disclosures  of  an 
amazing  scientific  advance,  the  passions  of 
expanding  democracy,  the  calculated  tumult 
of  discontented  industrialism,  the  agonies  of 
the  greatest  war  of  history,  and  the  wistful 
emotions  of  innumerable  broken  hearts  attempt¬ 
ing  to  pierce  the  veil  between  the  living  and 
the  dead.  The  measure  and  the  manner  of 
one’s  reaction  to  any  or  all  of  these  influences 
will  determine  his  characterization  of  the  times. 
But,  allowing  for  wide  range  of  difference  in 
this  personal  reaction,  some  few  factors  of  the 
present  day  may  be  confidently  affirmed  as 
representative  and  characteristic  of  the  con¬ 
ditions  with  which  religion  has  to  deal. 

II 

It  is  preeminently  a  day  of  revolt.  Those 
years  before  the  war,  quiet,  comfortable,  undis¬ 
turbed  as  they  appear  to  us  in  retrospect,  were 
alive  with  insurrections  against  the  stated 
order  of  the  past,  though  we  do  not  appreciate 

16 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


the  fact  at  full  value.  Life  has  been  so  blud¬ 
geoned  by  the  war  that  our  minds  hardly  pass 
it  in  their  search  for  the  sources  of  present  ills 
or  interests;  but  it  is  to  be  remembered  that 
the  war  did  not  begin,  de  novo ,  an  original 
human  order.  It  interrupted,  on  the  one  hand, 
and  accelerated,  on  the  other,  processes  which 
were  active  long  before  1914.  It  was  long 
before  the  war  that  the  spirit  of  revolt  asserted 
itself  in  literature  with  free  verse  and  the  drama 
of  the  younger  Russians;  in  music,  with  the 
innovations  of  Debussy  and  his  radical  contem¬ 
poraries;  in  art,  with  the  Cubists,  who  have 
given  way  to  more  and  more  extravagant 
expressionists  as  the  years  have  passed.  It  was 
long  before  1914  that  the  voices  of  protest 
against  the  social  and  industrial  order  grew 
from  isolated  and  suspected  criticism  into  an 
unmistakable  chorus  of  indictment.  Men  not 
past  middle  life  can  barely  remember  when  the 
presence  of  a  single  very  modest  and,  according 
to  the  standards  of  to-day,  very  conservative 
volume  on  socialism  seemed  to  cast  a  sinister 
shadow  over  a  bookcase,  and  was  regarded  as 
a  dangerous  and  irreligious  thing.  That  is  a 
long  way  back  from  the  present  time  in  which 
our  shelves  are  crowded  with  volumes  beside 
which  such  frightening  predecessors  would  be 
as  sheep  among  wolves.  It  was  long  before 

17 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


1914  that  the  solid  bulwarks  of  orthodox  the¬ 
ology  rebuilt  largely  of  materials  quarried  from 
“Paradise  Lost,”  began  to  feel  the  assault  of 
questioning  and  rebellious  minds.  In  an  an¬ 
cient  century  the  Latin  scholars  erected  a 
particular  theology  in  order  to  support  and 
reinforce  the  temporal  authority  of  the  church. 
The  Reformation,  repudiating  the  claims  of 
the  church,  clung  to  the  theology  in  which 
those  claims  had  found  their  most  effective 
support.  The  Reformers,  transferring  their 
allegiance  from  a  continuously  inspired  church 
to  a  verbally  inspired  Bible,  carried  on  the 
ancient  tradition  of  fixed  creed,  an  inexorable 
God,  irresponsible  miracle.  Puritanism  built 
that  tradition  into  government,  Methodism 
organized  it  into  life  and  wove  it  into  song. 
The  form  has  changed  but  the  substance  has 
been  strangely  constant,  and  it  was  long  before 
the  war  that  the  liberal  revolt  against  that 
elder  tradition  began  to  be  effective. 

Across  those  years,  so  yeasty  underneath 
their  placid  surface,  the  war  broke  with  its 
release  of  impulses  hitherto  suppressed  by 
custom,  its  destruction  of  old  restraints,  its 
disregard  of  old  conventions.  Politically  it 
has  brought  us  revolutionary  Russia,  an  Asia 
kindling  to  conflagration,  and  in  America  a 
discontent  which  ranges  from  constructive 

18 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


reform  to  the  vehemence  of  anarchy.  Socially 
it  has  given  us  the  coarseness,  the  irreverence, 
the  extravagance,  the  egoism  of  a  generation 
which  would  sacrifice  protective  order  for 
insecure  freedom,  and  the  refinements  which 
hitherto  have  given  life  its  charm  for  the  in¬ 
dulgence  of  undisciplined,  and  not  infrequently 
disastrous,  self-expression. 

To-day  is  also  a  day  of  Naturalism.  The 
sense  of  the  supernatural  which  subdued  and 
sustained  a  former  generation  has  very  largely 
passed.  This,  of  course,  is  a  direct  result  of 
the  disclosures  of  natural  science  as  they  have 
ceased  to  be  the  property  of  specialists  and 
have  become,  through  education  and  popular 
literature,  the  possession  of  the  common  mind. 
“The  great  revolutionary  task  of  nineteenth- 
century  thinkers,  to  speak  it  briefly,  was  to  put 
man  into  nature.  The  great  task  of  twentieth- 
century  thinkers  is  to  get  him  out  again.”2 
Yesterday  men  encouraged  and  maintained 
themselves  amid  the  bewilderments  of  expe¬ 
rience  by  a  well-nigh  universal  and  always 
comfortable  belief  in  Divine  Providence,  but 
to-day  the  iron  reign  of  law  has  seemed  to 
disestablish  Providence  and  enthrone  an  un¬ 
named  Fate,  as,  “blind  to  good  and  evil,  omnip¬ 
otent  matter  rolls  on  its  relentless  way.”  The 


*  Sherman,  Contemporary  Literature,  p.  10.  Henry  Holt  and  Company. 

19 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

Puritans,  Macaulay  has  told  us,  were  sure  that 
legions  of  ministering  angels  had  charge  over 
them,  that  on  their  slightest  actions  the  spirits 
of  light  and  darkness  looked  with  anxious 
interest,  and  that  events  which  politicians 
ascribed  to  earthly  causes  had,  in  fact,  been 
ordained  on  their  account.  The  modern  man 
puts  his  trust  in  white  corpuscles,  complexes, 
and  vitamines.  No  one  will  deny  that  the 
present  attitude  toward  nature  is  quite  dif¬ 
ferent  from  that  of  an  elder  day  when  the  out¬ 
ward  order  was  to  every  man,  as  has  been 
said  of  Bishop  Berkeley,  the  ceaseless  speech 
of  God  to  his  heart. 

A  third  feature  of  the  present  time  which 
cannot  escape  observation  is  the  expansion  of 
human  and  humane  interest  toward  the  social 
unity  of  the  world,  the  contemporary  humanita- 
rianism  which  expresses  the  kinship  of  humanity 
across  all  national  and  racial  barriers.  Ever 
since  the  beginnings  of  easy  and  immediate 
communication  the  social  unity  of  humankind 
has  been  increasingly  emphasized,  but  never 
was  that  unity  so  inclusively  recognized  as  it 
is  to-day.  A  few  years  ago  it  was  sufficient  to 
remark  the  close  relationship  of  markets — 
observing  that  drought  on  South-American 
grazing  lands  raised  the  price  of  American 
shoes,  and  that  good  crops  in  Kansas  made 

20 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


bread  cheaper  to  England’s  mill  hands.  To¬ 
day  one  must  go  farther  than  such  simple  com¬ 
mercial  contacts.  There  are  the  unifying 
fellowships  of  science  which  know  no  nation¬ 
ality,  and  the  common  aims  of  labor  as  regis¬ 
tered  in  the  Internationale.  There  was  the 
recent  association  of  many  nations  in  the  war 
against  the  Central  Powers;  and  there  remains 
the  comradeship  of  agony  in  the  areas  swept 
by  the  Four  Horsemen  of  the  Apocalypse. 
There  remains  also  the  comradeship  of  help  in 
which  unbroken  peoples  join.  No  nation  now 
stands  alone  amid  the  enterprise  of  life;  and 
no  idea,  ideal,  prosperity,  reform,  or  purpose 
can  be  maintained  unrelated  to  and  unmodi¬ 
fied  by  these  inescapable  unities  of  the  world. 

With  these  factors  of  the  present  time,  and 
others  unnamed,  one  further  characteristic 
of  the  day  must  be  carried  in  mind.  It  is  the 
pessimism  which  marks  so  effective  a  portion 
of  our  living  and  formative  interests.  The 
generation  before  us  was  a  generation  of  hope. 
Its  optimism  was  not  wholly  well  founded,  as 
the  years  have  lately  demonstrated,  but  it  was 
no  less  real  and  distinctive.  The  nobler  aspects 
of  the  theory  of  evolution  engendered  the  belief 
that  the  movements  of  life  were  invariably 
progressive  and,  regardless  of  individual 
choices,  the  thoughts  of  men  were  widened  with 

21 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


the  process  of  the  suns  as  they  raced  from 
heaven  to  heaven.  The  impulses  to  liberty, 
brotherhood,  and  equality,  released  by  the 
American  struggle  for  independence  and  flung 
around  the  world  by  the  French  Revolution, 
carried  down  the  years  the  conviction  of  social 
progress  as  certain  as  that  forecast  by  science. 
The  conviction  was  further  reinforced  by  the 
traditional  religious  hope  of  the  kingdom  of 
God.  Men  and  women  still  felt  something  of 
the  jubilant  anticipations  of  those  times 

“In  which  the  meager,  stale,  forbidding  ways 
Of  custom,  law,  and  statute,  took  at  once 
The  attraction  of  a  country  in  romance.” 

The  contrast  between  that  and  the  present 
mood  is  almost  absolute.  One  searches  almost, 
if  not  altogether,  in  vain,  through  current 
literature  and  thought  for  any  note  of  opti¬ 
mism.  In  philosophy  there  are  Professor 
Dewey’s  materialism  and  the  hopeless  atheism 
of  Bertrand  Russell.  In  history  one  meets 
recurrently  the  economic  interpretation  with  its 
sordid  premises  and  its  stupid  conclusions.  In 
biography  Lytton  Strachey  has  set  a  new 
standard  of  cleverness  in  a  mode  which  dis¬ 
covers  the  inspiration  of  General  Gordon  to  have 
been  drink  and  drugs,  and  writes  down  Florence 
Nightingale  as  a  querulous  and  conceited 

22 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


busybody.  Contemporary  criticism  flowers  in 
the  anonymous  judgments  of  authors  whose 
courage  is  in  concealment  and  who  can  find 
nothing  to  admire  in  the  public  men  upon  whom 
have  rested  the  immeasureable  responsibilities 
of  the  day.  In  fiction  our  generation  seem  to 
drag  out  a  drab  and  sordid  spectacle  of  mean¬ 
ness,  futility,  and  sex.  It  is  almost  the  mode  to 
declare  that  international  finance  purposely 
brought  on  the  war  for  the  benefit  of  profiteers; 
that  there  was  nothing  of  high  purpose,  nothing 
of  fine  spirit,  nothing  of  that  sacrificial  passion 
in  the  common  men  who  fought  and  died  in 
it  which  hitherto  have  always  wrought  some 
sacramental  splendor  for  the  ideal.  Progress, 
justice,  peace,  civilization  itself,  all  are  pro¬ 
claimed  but  dreams  with  which  humanity  has 
deceived  itself  within  the  iron  imprisonments  of 
necessity.  Lieutenant-Colonel  Repington  tells 
of  an  American  officer  who  said  that  he  was 
reading  a  history  of  the  future,  and  then 
produced  a  history  of  the  Middle  Ages;  which 
reminds  one  of  an  acute  remark  of  Richard 
Jefferies  to  the  effect  that  of  all  the  inventions 
of  casuistry  with  which  man  has  manacled  him¬ 
self,  none  is  so  powerful  as  the  supposition  that 
nothing  more  is  possible. 

The  spirit  of  revolt,  the  inexorability  of 
nature,  the  expansion  of  human  interest  to 

23 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


approximate  the  unity  of  humankind,  the 
pessimism  which  corrodes  the  very  strength 
of  life — these  are  distinguishable  factors  in 
present-day  experience  and  apprehension. 
There  are  doubtless  others,  bulking  more  or 
less  largely,  according  to  the  temperament  and 
outlook  of  the  individual.  But  all  offer  no 
new  problem  to  the  mind  or  heart  of  man;  they 
simply  state  the  old  questions  in  new  terms. 
Amid  them  we  stand,  as  our  forbears  have 
stood  amid  whatever  were  the  facts  in  which 
they  found  themselves  involved.  Like  them, 
we  meet  the  immemorial  inquiry  from  within, 
not  essentially  affected  by  the  circumstances 
without,  as  to  life’s  meaning,  its  direction,  its 
destiny. 

Few  travelers  crossing  the  Atlantic  for  the 
first  time  but  have  discovered  themselves  face 
to  face,  soon  or  late,  with  those  lofty  and 
searching  introspections  which  the  sense  of  the 
illimitable  sea  inspires.  The  author  recalls 
very  clearly  a  midnight  when,  during  wartime,  he 
stood  alone  on  the  deck  of  a  liner  in  midocean 
under  a  moonless  sky.  The  stars  were  dim, 
and  around  the  vessel  only  the  faintest  of  faint 
lights  hovered.  The  sea  rolled  past  in  long, 
majestic  swells,  and  from  time  to  time  could  be 
heard,  unseen,  the  splash  of  breaking  waves. 
Through  the  dull  light  the  lines  of  a  ship  could 

24 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


barely  be  discerned  amid  the  convoy  which  the 
perils  of  the  war  made  necessary.  The  bridge 
on  which,  by  day  the  captain  stood,  for  the 
moment  was  empty.  Overhead  was  the  black¬ 
ness  of  the  midnight  sky,  the  dim  stars  hardly 
lighting  it,  and  all  around,  through  the  count¬ 
less  miles  of  gloom,  was  Matthew  Arnold’s 
“unplumbed,  salt,  estranging  sea.”  One 
thought  instinctively  of  what  was  ahead;  and 
who  knew?  War  raging  on  the  continent  to 
which  the  ship  was  bound;  submarines  haunting 
the  waters  through  which  it  was  to  pass;  storms 
hurrying  down  from  what  icebound  fastnesses 
of  the  north;  the  pitiless,  insatiable  ocean  beat¬ 
ing  at  the  vessel’s  bow  and  flinging  thunders 
with  the  spray  that  flashed  across  her  head! 
What  were  they  doing  on  the  other  ships  just 
glimpsed  across  the  night?  What  experiences 
were  waiting  on  the  other  side?  Where  was 
the  captain  and  who  was  steering  us  across  the 
deep?  What  of  the  men  and  women,  the 
children,  left  behind,  whose  thoughts  and 
prayers  were  following  the  ship?  And  one 
man,  at  least,  thought  of  his  father’s  and  his 
mother’s  graves;  and  what  does  this  little 
human  life  of  ours  involve  and  mean,  with  its 
holocausts  of  war,  its  majestic  heroisms,  its 
pathos  of  separation,  its  splendors  of  sacrifice? 

So  a  man  standing  on  the  lonely  deck  of  a 

25 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

ship  that  plunges  through  a  moaning  ocean 
under  a  midnight  sky  illumined  dimly  by  the 
stars,  is  an  allegory  of  our  world  of  men  swing¬ 
ing  across  the  expanse  of  time.  Events  may 
change  as  the  years  pass;  customs  may  be 
altered,  knowledge  widened,  courage  strength¬ 
ened,  superstitions  dissolved  amid  the  light  of 
science;  but  around  the  men  of  every  gener¬ 
ation  Time  rolls  its  magic  and  its  mystery. 
Over  them  extend  the  impenetrable  ampli¬ 
tudes  of  star  and  space,  around  them  the  enigma 
of  their  comrades  in  the  same  bewildered 
voyage  of  life.  Behind  them  is  the  pathos  of 
a  thousand  buried  generations;  before  them 
the  awesome  silence  of  the  bourne  from  which 
no  man  has  yet  returned.  And  deep  speaking 
unto  deep  still  asks  the  age-old  questions: 
Whence  do  we  come?  Whither  do  we  go? 
What  means  this  little  life  of  man? 

Ill 

In  other  words,  amid  the  changes  of  a  chang¬ 
ing  world,  the  needs  of  men  are  unaltered. 
Because  in  a  very  vital  fashion  men  themselves 
remain  unaltered.  We  speak  commonly  of 
how  time  changes  us;  and  to  look  at  a  man  of 
seventy-five  while  remembering  what  he  was  a 
half  a  century  before  is  to  be  sadly  reminded 

26 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 

of  the  tragedy  of  change.  But  what  is  essen¬ 
tially  us  does  not  change,  regardless  of  the 
years.  There  is  a  realm  of  experience,  intel¬ 
ligence,  emotion,  and  will  in  which  the  man  of 
twenty-five  and  the  man  of  a  half  a  century 
later  are  one.  We  remember.  Personal  iden¬ 
tity  endures;  and  while  the  body  breaks,  the 
black  hair  bleaches  to  silver,  the  ears  grow  dull 
and  only  faintly  hear  the  noise  and  music  of  the 
world,  the  eyes  grow  dim  and  only  vaguely  see 
the  moving  panorama  of  association  and  the 
printed  page  the  man  within,  unchanged  amid 
his  crumbling  tenement,  abides.  And  with  that 
durable  identity  there  remains  the  reality  of 
his  “ needs  that  no  man  can  meet.’9  The  great 
experiences  of  human  life  fall  upon  all  men, 
regardless  of  their  times  and  places,  then- 
knowledge  or  their  power.  Theirs  alike  is  the 
mystery  of  pain,  the  urge  of  labor  that  ends  in 
weariness  and  of  success  whose  goal  is  dis¬ 
content.  Theirs  alike  are  the  cruelty  of  disil¬ 
lusionment  and  those  recurrent  disappoint¬ 
ments  which  wither  confidence  and  sap  the 
springs  of  courage.  Theirs  alike  are  the  scourge 
of  sin  and  the  cleansing  streams  of  pity  and  of 
terror.  Theirs  are  the  glory  of  love  and 
the  bitterness  of  sorrow  and  the  bewilder¬ 
ment  of  the  grave.  Theirs  the  endless  inter¬ 
rogation  of  life  itself  forever  finding,  though 

27 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


not  always  phrasing  its  discovery,  that  eternity 
is  set  in  its  heart. 

So  also,  notwithstanding  the  efflorescence  of 
revolt  which  marks  the  present  day  as  it  has 
recurred  within  groups  of  insurrection  in  every 
generation,  within  the  deeps  of  human  expe¬ 
rience,  both  individual  and  social,  the  sense  of 
obligation  remains  insistent  upon  men,  what¬ 
ever  changes  may  transform  the  face  and  forms 
of  life.  The  philosopher  Kant,  looking  in 
wonder  at  the  starry  heavens  above  him,  found 
the  magnificence  of  the  universe  without 
answered  by  the  majesty  of  the  moral  order 
that  spoke  within.  So  does  every  man  in  those 
solemn  moments  of  meditation  and  insight 
which,  infrequently  or  often,  come  to  every 
one.  In  childhood’s  dawn,  in  the  fair  morning 
of  youth,  in  the  glory  of  young  manhood’s 
ideals  and  aspirations,  in  maturity’s  high  noon, 
when  premonitions  of  decay  begin  to  cast  their 
slender  shadows  across  the  road  of  life,  in  the 
dusks  of  age  that  brood  swiftly  into  night,  the 
voice  of  obligation  speaks  in  tones  always  ap¬ 


propriate  to  the  listening  spirit,  and  speaks  the 
one  serene,  inescapable  appeal.  And  amid 
their  needs,  under  this  imperious  sense  of  duty, 
men  want  “neither  to  be  soothed  by  ortho¬ 
doxies  nor  to  be  excited  by  heterodoxies,  but 
to  .  .  .  listen  to  the  honest  recital  of  what  the 


28 


•  •  • 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


mind  has  found,  what  conclusions  it  has  reached, 
what  ideas  have  best  stood  the  great  vital  test, 
the  fears  that  have  been  clouds,  and  the  hopes 
that  have  been  favoring  winds,  in  the  adven¬ 
turous  voyage  of  time/’3 

There  are  also  permanences  other  than  the 
needs  of  men  and  their  sense  of  obligation. 
With  them,  and  amid  the  changes  wrought  by 
drab  or  tragic  time,  there  remains  the  instinct 
of  the  human  heart  for  God.  It  is  not  to  be 
questioned  that  there  are  voices  raised  to-day, 
as  in  every  generation,  loud,  commanding, 
insidious  voices,  denying  in  the  name  of  phil¬ 
osophy  and  reason,  in  the  name  of  experience 
and  progress,  the  existence  or  even  the  desir¬ 
ability  of  God;  but  the  vehemence  of  their 
denial  witnesses  to  the  strength  of  the  con¬ 
viction  they  would  dislodge.  It  has  been 
simply  but  truly  said  that  the  word  “God” 
contains  the  remedial  secret  for  all  our  vast 
human  need;  and  notwithstanding  the  pro¬ 
tests  of  denial  which  shrill  like  thin,  despairing 
winds  from  waste  lands  where  no  man  comes, 
the  great  voice  of  humanity  attests  its  incor¬ 
rigible  instinct  for  a  living  God.  It  is  of  God 
that  nature,  for  all  its  mechanisms,  still  re¬ 
minds  men;  his  reality  that  kindles  in  the  red 


3  Gordon,  Aspects  of  the  Infinite  Mystery,  p.  5.  Houghton  Mifflin  Com¬ 
pany. 

29 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

of  dawn,  that  glows  in  the  radiance  of  the 
summer  sky,  that  rides  upon  the  tempest  and 
marshals  a  hundred  pageants  in  the  procession 
of  the  seasons.  It  is  the  unexpressed  convic¬ 
tion  of  God  which  makes  possible  our  nobler 
human  hopes  and  impels  the  best  of  whatever 
may  be  our  adventures  of  intelligence  and 
affection.  It  is  this  conviction  of  God  which, 
unexplained  yet  uneluded  4 ‘makes  men  eager 
to  live  yet  nobly  curious  to  die.”  It  may  be 
that  the  anecdote  has  no  foundation  in  fact 
which  describes  Napoleon  as  interrupting  a 
discussion  of  atheism  among  his  officers  by 
pointing  to  the  brilliance  of  the  Syrian  sky  and 
asking,  “Gentlemen,  who  made  all  that?”  It 
is  quite  possible  that  modem  astronomical 
knowledge  would  suggest  an  answer  to  Napo¬ 
leon  entirely  out  of  the  range  of  the  simple 
theological  or  religious  setting  in  which  he 
conceived  the  question.  But  the  question 
itself  can  never  be  lifted  from  the  more  intimate 
experience  of  men.  What  lives  behind  our 
life?  What  urges  our  spiritual  quest?  Though 
perhaps  we  know  the  history  of  the  forms  of  the 
visible  universe,  nevertheless  the  mystery  re¬ 
mains  as  to  the  origin  of  the  fact.  Whose 
voice  is  this  that  speaks  to  an  inner  self  the 
sense  of  duty,  the  indictment  of  sin,  the  glory 
of  hope,  the  invitation  of  the  infinite,  declaring 

30 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


that  the  world  without  is  too  small  for  the  soul 
within?  The  instinct  for  God  remains  amid 
illimitable  change. 

There  remains  also  the  historic  Christ.  It  is 
not  necessary  at  this  point  to  give  him  any 
theological  meaning  or  to  refer  to  the  definitions 
written  in  the  great  metaphysical  creeds.  One 
need  not  be  reminded  of  the  luminous  figure  of 
faith  and  affection  to  which  nineteen  hundred 
years  of  Christian  worship  have  given  peculiar 
sanctity.  It  is  enough  simply  to  recall  that 
from  the  least  Christian  and  from  the  most  un- 
theological  consideration  of  the  human  Jesus,  he 
still  remains  the  most  dynamic  fact  of  history; 
the  simple  record  of  the  three  short  years  of  his 
active  life  having  done  more,  as  Lecky  wrote, 
“to  regenerate  and  soften  mankind  than  all  the 
disquisitions  of  philosophers,  and  all  the  ex¬ 
hortations  of  moralists.’  ’  A  historian  like 
H.  G.  Wells  resolves  to  write  of  Jesus,  with  the 
most  scrupulous  care  to  treat  him  as  a  man,  so 
that  if,  as  he  says,  the  light  of  divinity  should 
shine  through  his  narrative,  the  historian  would 
neither  have  helped  nor  hindered  it.  He  so 
writes,  baldly,  cynically  at  times,  yet  his  pages 
redisclose  how  the  name  of  Jesus,  as  Emerson 
put  it,  is  plowed  into  the  history  of  the  world. 
Every  generation  has  made  mention  of  the 
darkness  which  it  has  found  obscuring  the  path 

31 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


of  human  progress  in  those  nobler  ascents  of  the 
spirit  which  alone  justify  the  struggle  of  the 
flesh  and  mind.  But  every  generation,  seen  in 
true  perspective,  confirms  the  truth  that  ‘The 
light  that  has  come  to  us  through  two  thousand 
years  is  .  .  .  from  Calvary.”4 

It  is  but  illustrating  this  to  remark  that  the 
historic  Christ  remains  “the  externalized  con¬ 
science  of  the  race.”  Regardless  of  their  most 
divergent  attitudes  toward  the  Bible,  the 
church,  revealed  religion,  and  Christian  theol¬ 
ogy,  men  judge  the  quality  and  urge  the  claims 
of  their  best  social  purposes  by  an  appeal  to 
the  sanctions  of  Christ  as  discoverable  in  his 
words  and  example;  while  it  is  not  a  matter  for 
argument  but  of  experience  that  no  man  comes 
face  to  face,  honestly,  with  the  historic  Jesus 
and  remains  indifferent.  As  a  Swiss  theo¬ 
logian  described  his  own  experience,  Christ 
makes  a  silence  in  the  heart.  Studied,  con¬ 
tinually  reexamined,  the  Scriptures  which  por¬ 
tray  his  life  subjected  to  the  most  relentless 
criticism,  through  centuries  of  experiment, 
through  wars  and  atheisms,  through  betrayals 
by  his  friends  and  misunderstandings  of  his 
enemies;  his  precepts  approved  but  not  carried 
out  into  action,  his  example  honored  but  not 


4  Zilboorg,  The  Passing  of  the  Old  Order  in  Europe,  p.  182.  Thomas 
Seltzer,  New  York. 

32 


COMMONWEALTH  VS.  CHRISTIANITY 


followed,  his  spirit  recognized  but  not  appro¬ 
priated,  nevertheless  Christ  remains. 

This,  then,  is  our  day,  as  one  observer  sees  it, 
the  product  not  alone  of  those  unceasing  alter¬ 
ations  which  mark  the  advance  of  knowledge, 
the  growth  of  experience,  the  march  of  time, 
and  are  the  inevitable  consequence  of  life,  but 
the  product  also  of  the  passion,  war  and  disil¬ 
lusionment  which  make  the  tragic  drama  of 
time.  Here  is  its  spirit  of  revolt,  its  subjection 
to  nature,  its  outreach  toward  unity,  its  pes¬ 
simism  brewed  from  the  caldron  of  conflict, 
misery,  and  disappointment,  and  poisoning 
many  of  the  springs  of  modern  thought.  Here 
are  its  searching  and  unanswered  inquiries,  its 
morbid  introspections,  its  independence  swelling 
to  defiance  of  all  authority,  its  insatiable  quests 
for  certitude.  It  is  this  day  which  is  now 
challenging  religion,  and  with  which,  in  all  its 
aspects,  religion  must  deal.  And  the  first 
enterprise  which  religion  must  now  undertake 
for  this  particular  and  threatening  day  is  to 
vindicate  its  own  claims  by  a  convincing  redis¬ 
closure  of  its  character. 


33 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 

The  remark  with  which  the  former  chapter 
closed,  to  the  effect  that  the  first  enterprise 
which  religion  must  undertake  to-day  is  to 
vindicate  its  own  claim  by  a  convincing  redis¬ 
closure  of  its  character,  is  little  more  than  a 
declaration  of  the  obvious.  On  every  hand  one 
may  hear  a  veritable  chorus  positively  fore¬ 
casting  the  religion  for  the  day  and  for  the  days 
to  come.  In  1913  Professor  Bury,  interpreting 
the  “new  Monism,”  found  the  “mark  of  spirit¬ 
ual  progress  in  the  fact  that  religion  is  grad¬ 
ually  becoming  less  indispensable.  The  further 
we  go  back  in  the  past,  the  more  valuable  is 
religion  as  an  element  in  civilization;  as  we 
advance,  it  retreats  more  and  more  into  the 
background,  to  be  replaced  by  science.”1  Pro¬ 
fessor  Zilboorg  more  recently  has  written  that 
“A  new  life  and  a  new  religion  must  come  into 
Europe,  a  religion  which  will  first  of  all  have 
for  its  keystone  the  value  of  an  individual  per  se, 
and  a  belief  in  society  as  a  solidarized  gathering 
of  individuals.”2  Professor  Ellwood  is  more 

1  Bury,  History  of  Freedom  of  Thought,  p.  230.  Henry  Holt  and  Company. 

2  Zilboorg,  The  Passing  of  the  Old  Order  in  Europe,  p.  171.  Tbomaa 
Seltzer,  New  York. 


34 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


specific.  “The  religion  needed  by  the  modern 
world,”  he  declares,  is  “a  more  rational,  revital¬ 
ized,  socialized  Christianity.”3 

These  forecasts  undoubtedly  point  the  way 
to  truth.  They  are  significant  formulations  of 
very  widespread  and  various  convictions  as  to 
the  nature  of  the  religion  which  will  be  adequate 
for  the  times  before  us.  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells, 
writing  of  the  great  intellectual  epoch  of  Alex¬ 
andria  prior  to  the  advent  of  Christianity,  has 
said  that  “men  were  requiring  deities  with  an 
outlook  at  least  as  wide  as  the  empires”;4  which 
could  be  written  as  truthfully  to-day.  It  is  the 
universal  mind  of  the  Hebrew  prophets  which 
is  reasserting  itself  to-day,  the  mind,  that  is, 
of  Amos,  who  saw  the  Ethiopians  as  the  children 
of  Israel  unto  Jehovah;  the  mind  of  the  author 
of  Jonah,  who  recognized  beyond  his  racial 
prejudices  the  claims  of  Nineveh  upon  the 
compassion  of  God.  It  is  the  universal  Christ 
of  Saint  Paul  whom  we  must  now  realize;  in 
whom  “there  cannot  be  Greek  and  Jew,  circum¬ 
cision  and  uncircumcision,  barbarian,  Scythian, 
bondman,  freeman.”  To  borrow  a  modern 
word,  we  must  come  to  a  Christian  Inter¬ 
nationale  in  a  vital  and  effective  community 

*  Ell  wood,  The  Reconstruction  of  Religion,  p.  viii.  Reprinted  by  permis¬ 
sion  of  The  Macmillan  Company. 

♦Wells,  Outline  of  History,  Vol  i,  p.  411.  Reprinted  by  permission  of 
The  Macmillan  Company. 


35 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


of  spirit.  That,  of  course,  is  a  New-Test  ament 
emphasis.  Jesus’  message  was  of  the  kingdom 
of  God;  and  it  would  be  difficult  indeed  to 
understand  the  triumphant  note  through  all 
the  mystery  and  magnificence  of  the  Apoca¬ 
lypse  except  on  the  thesis  that  Christianity  is 
ultimately  a  spiritual  order  coincident  with  the 
total  activity  of  human  life,  and  so  transforming, 
directing,  sustaining  all  that  we  mean  by  inter¬ 
national  movements  and  ideals.  As  Doctor 
Cadman  has  written,  “If  Christianity  cannot 
consolidate  the  race  in  Christ  and  redeem  it  by 
his  mediatorship,  it  means  nothing  more  and 
does  nothing  more  than  any  other  literary 
faith.”5 

But  there  is  another  emphasis.  Without 
denying  the  racial  outreach  of  Christianity 
there  is  a  somewhat  less  inclusive  delineation  of 
it  which  is  prominent  in  the  mind  of  the  day. 
It  is  the  delineation  of  it  as  an  ethical  impera¬ 
tive,  a  practical  organization  of  conduct  and 
ideal  occupying  the  field  of  national  life  and 
purpose.  It  has  its  precedent  in  the  conversion 
of  Constantine,  the  significance  of  which  was 
not  that  Christianity  had  won  the  allegiance  of 
a  king  but  that  it  had  changed  the  policy  of  an 
empire.  It  has  precedent  also  in  that  organi- 


6  Cadman,  Ambassadors  of  God,  p,  36.  Reprinted  by  permission  of  The 
Macmillan  Company. 

36 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


zation  of  New-Testament  principle  and  inten¬ 
tion  which  lay  within  the  austere  extravagance 
of  the  Republic  of  Geneva;  and  yet  another  in 
the  fundamental  effectiveness  of  the  Puritan 
commonwealth. 

The  pronouncement  of  Professor  Ellwood 
reflects  still  another  emphasis  much  stressed 
by  contemporary  thinking,  namely,  that  the 
religion  for  the  day  must  be  first  and  foremost 
right  relationship  among  men,  a  social  rectitude 
effective  in  justice,  democracy,  fraternity, 
through  the  orders  and  enterprises  of  labor, 
leisure,  pleasure,  and  possession.  And  while 
it  is  true  that  Christendom,  as  was  written 
almost  a  generation  ago,  “is  full  of  Christian¬ 
ities,  and  to  say  what  simply  and  essentially  is 
the  Christian  religion  is  one  of  the  problems  of 
the  .  .  .  century,”6  yet  if  we  shall  discover  the 
character  of  religion  which  will  satisfy  this 
present  social  demand,  we  shall  have  found  that 
which  the  others  seek. 

For  the  present  day  is  preeminently  a  day  of 
social  exploration.  Its  revolt  springs  most 
violently  from  the  social  organization  of  con¬ 
temporary  life;  its  progress  in  the  understanding 
of  nature  issues  first  in  social  results;  its  trend 
toward  the  unity  of  humankind  is  particularly 
fostered  through  the  social  orders  of  industry; 


6  Simpson,  The  Fact  of  Christ ,  p.  25.  Fleming  H.  Revell  Company. 

37 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

its  pessimism  derives  most  effectively  from  the 
failure  of  the  social  order  to  satisfy  the  human 
ideal.  The  age  of  industrialism,  inaugurated 
in  1776  by  Adam  Smith’s  Wealth  of  Nations 
and  Wilkinson’s  cylinders  which  made  Watts’ 
steam  engine  a  commercial  success,  has  pro¬ 
duced  its  fatal  results  in  organized  social 
injustice  on  the  one  hand,  and  a  hopelessly 
materialistic  conception  of  life  on  the  other; 
and  religion  is  inevitably  appraised  by  the 
quality  of  its  social  applications. 

This  social  estimate  of  religion  is  made  all 
the  more  authoritative  now  because  of  the 
failure  of  religion  in  the  past  to  recognize  its 
social  obligation.  John  Newton  wrote  the 
hymn, 

“Amazing  grace!  How  sweet  the  sound. 

That  saved  a  wretch  like  me! 

I  once  was  lost,  but  now  am  found. 

Was  blind,  but  now  I  see!” 

as  he  sat  on  the  deck  of  the  slave  ship  he  com¬ 
manded,  the  hold  of  which  was  packed  with 
Negroes  torn  by  force  from  Africa  to  be  sold 
into  hopeless  and  cruel  bondage,  concerning 
which  he  said  “he  never  had  the  least  scruples.” 
No  little  of  the  bitterness  of  society  and  the 
scandal  of  the  church,  in  every  generation,  has 
been  that  so  many  men  who  were  good  Chris¬ 
tians  when  considered  personally,  have  been 

38 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


bad  citizens  socially  regarded;  and  men  who 
in  their  private  character  have  loved  God 
sincerely,  in  their  public  capacity  have  not 
loved  other  men  at  all.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  Professor  Zilboorg  is  right  in  his  contention 
that  the  new  religion  must  express  the  value 
of  the  individual  and  a  belief  in  society.  The 
religion  which  does  that  adequately  will  not 
be  superseded  by  Professor  Bury’s  science,  for 
it  will  itself  be  scientific  enough  to  endure. 

I 

Where,  now,  shall  we  discover  this  “revital¬ 
ized,  socialized  Christianity”?  In  one  of  his 
earlier  volumes  Mr.  Gilbert  Chesterton  observes 
that  he  had  always  had  a  fancy  for  writing  a 
romance  about  an  English  yachtsman  who 
miscalculated  his  course,  and  discovered 
England,  under  the  impression  that  it  was  a 
new  island  in  the  South  Seas.  “What  could  be 
more  delightful,”  he  asks,  “than  to  have  in 
the  same  few  minutes  all  the  fascinating  terrors 
of  going  abroad  combined  with  the  humane 
security  of  coming  home  again?”7  Mr.  Ches¬ 
terton  uses  his  fancy  to  illustrate  his  own 
spiritual  pilgrimage;  but  his  unwritten  romance 
may  do  service  with  a  far  broader  applicability 
than  to  his  personal  experience.  It  will 

1  Chesterton,  Orthodoxy,  p.  14.  Dodd,  Mead  and  Company. 

39 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


represent  the  pilgrimage  of  the  modern  mind  in 
its  search  to-day  for  security  and  direction 
among  the  perilous  high  places  of  the  spiritual 
life.  When  the  present  age,  so  revolutionary, 
so  discontented  and  adventuresome,  reaches  the 
end  of  its  quest  for  an  authentic  apprehension 
of  life,  of  duty,  and  of  hope,  it  will  find  itself  in 
no  new  country  of  revelation,  but  back  home  in 
the  faith  once  delivered  to  the  saints.  This  is 
not  to  say  that  the  faith  once  delivered  to  the 
saints  was  delivered  once  for  all,  and  that  our 
spiritual  homeland  remains  unchanged  in  form 
and  aspect  down  all  the  changing  years.  The 
fields  of  experience  and  thought,  like  those  of 
the  American  West,  have  doubtless  altered 
greatly  since  the  earlier  settlers  took  possession. 
The  woods  are  cleared,  old  crops  have  given 
place  to  harvests  formerly  undreamed.  But 
the  uplands  are  the  same,  the  valleys  slope  sun¬ 
ward  as  before,  the  streams  still  murmur  from 
their  ancient  springs,  and  daybreak  kindles 
glory  as  of  old  upon  the  far  horizon  lines. 

It  is  to  be  remarked  in  passing  that  this 
rediscovery  of  religion  is  no  new  theme.  Nearly 
seventy-five  years  ago  young  Thomas  Went¬ 
worth  Higginson  wrote  to  a  friend,  “The  more 
clearly  I  see,  the  more  fervently  I  surrender 
myself  to,  the  new  impulse  that  is  come  on  the 
world  .  .  .  the  more  I  find  everywhere  ground 

40 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


of  discontent  in  all  our  existing  religious  and 
ecclesiastical  forms.5’8  At  hardly  any  period 
in  the  past  eighteen  hundred  years  could  those 
words  not  have  been  written  as  pertinently  as 
they  were  in  1848.  The  great  historical  devel¬ 
opments  and  divergences  of  Christianity  have 
always  sprung  from  the  ground  of  discontent 
in  contemporary  religious  and  ecclesiastical 
forms.  The  Great  Awakening,  The  Oxford 
Movement,  The  Wesleyan  Revival,  the  German 
Reformation,  the  popular  evangel  of  Wycliffe 
and  the  Lollards — all  such  historic  activities 
of  the  human  spirit,  transforming  here,  deflect¬ 
ing  there,  the  stream  of  religious  life  and  habit, 
have  been  preceded  by  new  impulses  come 
upon  the  world,  and  have  resulted  in  the 
disclosure  of  religion  in  aspects,  energies, 
efflorescences,  which  impressed  and  captured 
men  as  indubitable  revelations  of  an  original 
quality  and  kind. 

Unless  one  holds  this  clearly  in  mind,  error 
will  beset  him  on  every  hand  as  he  attempts  to 
formulate  the  “Christianity  for  the  times” 
which  is  so  prominent  in  present-day  thinking. 
Different  as  these  historic  religious  movements 
were,  at  heart  they  were  alike.  Each  began  in 
the  personal  experience  of  the  individual.  It 


8  Higginson,  Life  and  Letters  of  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson,  p.  15. 
Houghton  Mifflin  Company. 

41 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


is  upon  this  familiar  island  we  must  beach  our 
ships  again;  for  Christianity,  whatever  may  be 
its  expansions  and  articulations  in  international, 
national  and  social  orders,  is  fundamentally  a 
personal  experience  of  God,  and  public  life, 
social  relationships,  industrial  ethics,  will  reach 
no  further  and  rise  no  higher  than  their  source 
in  personal  experience.  One  can  hardly  escape 
the  feeling  that  the  social  enthusiasm  of  the 
day  has  almost  reached  the  point  of  mistaking 
good  citizenship  for  sanctity  and  of  counting 
a  man  a  Christian  disciple  if  he  does  what  any 
honest  pagan  could  do  as  well.  “The  social 
interest  does  not  create  the  clean  heart.”8 
Without  relaxing  our  concern  for  the  social 
application  of  religion,  we  must  reestablish  once 
more  the  primacy  of  personal  experience  re¬ 
lated  to  God  through  Christ,  and  thus  obligated 
to  the  reconstruction  of  the  entire  human  order, 
not  by  the  instruments  of  social  prudence  but 
by  the  constraints  of  a  divine  life. 

Modern  religion  is  very  properly  relating 
men  and  women  to  new  ideals  of  social  order, 
to  new  political  theories  and  new  industrial 
programs;  and  therein  has  somewhat  fallen 
into  a  very  natural  and  subtle  error.  It  has 
influenced  men  and  women  to  identify  religion 

#  Christianity  and  Problems  of  To-day  (Bross  Lectures  for  1921),  p.  73. 
Charles  Scribner’s  Sons,  Publishers. 

42 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


with  that  social  relationship,  and  the  essential 
quality  of  a  new  personal  relationship  to  God 
through  Jesus  Christ  has  been  obscured.  The 
appeal  of  even  so  primitive-minded  an  evange¬ 
list  as  Billy  Sunday  is,  generally  speaking,  not 
that  men  and  women  should  come  to  know 
God  but  that  they  should  inaugurate  a  new 
personal  habit:  should  pay  their  debts  and 
brighten  the  corner  where  they  are — nothing  of 
which  is  primarily  and  peculiarly  Christian. 
It  is  an  appeal  not  for  a  new  personal  experience 
but  for  a  new  ethical  program.  What  has  been 
lacking,  in  other  words,  in  our  organized  and 
individual  life,  is  not  right  purpose;  what  has 
been  lacking  is  power. 

In  saying  that  Christianity,  into  whatever 
other  relationships  it  may  develop,  is  primarily 
a  personal  relationship  to  God  through  the 
historical  and  spiritual  Christ,  it  must  also  be 
added  that  we  shall  probably  have  to  enlarge 
our  definitions  of  experience.  We  shall  prob¬ 
ably  be  compelled  to  restate  the  formulas  of 
relationship.  But  it  is  this  older  conception  of 
Christianity,  as  begun  in  personal  experience 
of  a  particular  kind  and  through  a  particular 
approach,  which  must  be  rediscovered.  Of 
late  it  has  been  seriously  obscured.  We  have 
been  so  concerned,  as  Professor  Fitch  has  said, 
“with  the  effect  of  our  religion  upon  the  com- 

43 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


munity  that  we  have  forgotten  that  the  heart 
of  religion  is  found  in  the  solitary  soul.’ 5 10 

That  merits  the  more  consideration  now 
because  the  evils  to  be  eradicated  from  these 
greater  social  orders  trace  back,  at  last,  to  the 
solitary  soul.  Past  the  influence  of  machinery, 
the  operations  of  economic  “laws,”  the  pressure 
of  long  tradition,  the  force  of  class  consciousness 
and  the  like,  at  the  roots  of  social  evil  is  individ¬ 
ual  will.  It  was  not  chancelleries  which  plunged 
the  world  in  war;  it  was  chancellors.  It  is  not 
diplomacy  that  fosters  the  selfish,  hostile 
attitudes  of  antagonistic  states;  it  is  diplomats. 
It  is  not  capital  that  sins  against  the  rights  of 
labor  and  the  public  good;  it  is  capitalists.  It 
is  not  organized  labor  that  profiteers  in  bad 
workmanship  and  idleness,  that  massacres 
miners  and  threatens  government;  it  is  laborers 
and  labor  leaders.  And  the  impotence  of 
these  socialized  conceptions  of  religion  in  the 
face  of  international,  national,  and  industrial 
emergencies  rises  out  of  their  disconnection 
from  the  inner  energies  of  the  personal  religious 
life.  “An  awakened  soul  is  the  beginning  of 
things.”* 11  Only  men  and  women  who  are 
personally  Christian  can  make  a  Christian 
society;  and  the  search  for  a  Christian  social 

10  Fitch,  Preaching  and  Paganism,  p.  171.  Yale  University  Press. 

11  Christianity  and  Problems  of  To-day  (Bross  Lectures  for  1921),  p.  74. 
Charles  Scribner’s  Sons,  publishers. 

44 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


order  is,  first  of  all,  a  search  for  the  Christian 
men  and  women  who  will  make  it. 

II 

But  more  is  involved  in  this  rediscovery  of 
religion  than  the  simple  and  rather  easy  return 
to  the  familiar  evangelical  insistence  upon  a 
particular  experience  as  its  heart.  When  we 
shall  have  come  back  to  it,  how  shall  we  realize 
that  experience,  and  how  shall  we  maintain  its 
creative  spiritual  energies  adequate  to  the 
expanding  social  activities  through  which  it  is 
to  be  expressed? 

Some  one  has  written  of  John  Calvin  that 
he  thought  the  one  way  to  realize  Christianity 
was  by  knowing  the  mind  of  Christ;  and  that 
this  mind  was  expressed  in  the  Scriptures; 
and  that  Calvin’s  cause  is  to  be  judged  by  his 
service  in  rendering  the  Scriptures  living  and 
credible.  It  is  not  to  be  denied  that  even 
this  far  after  Calvin’s  day  we  shall  realize 
Christianity  only  as  we  know  the  mind  of 
Christ;  and  it  is  a  fair  conclusion  that  we  shall 
know  the  mind  of  Christ  only  as,  under  the 
greatening  lights  of  science,  psychology  and 
social  history,  the  Scriptures  become  newly 
living  and  credible  to  us.  We  have  come 
back  to  the  data  of  Christianity  in  the  expe¬ 
rience  of  the  soul;  what,  therefore,  about  its 

45 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


documents?  What  about  the  Bible  and  the 
modern  religious  life? 

That  is  one  of  the  older  questions  with  which 
religion  as  well  as  common  sense — which,  by 
the  way,  is  not  an  alternative  to  religion — has 
had  to  meet;  and  it  is  still,  as  Professor  James 
Moffatt  has  said  in  his  Hibbert  Lectures  for 
1921,  “a  central  problem  to  define  the  exact 
relation  of  Christianity  to  its  sacred  book.”12 
One  of  the  types  of  mind  appearing  from  time 
to  time  within  the  church  has  difficulty  in 
using  the  Old  Testament  as  a  Christian  instru¬ 
ment.  If  one  were  compelled  to  discriminate 
between  the  Old  and  New  in  mutually  exclusive 
fashion,  of  course,  there  would  be  no  question 
as  to  the  supremacy  of  the  New  Testament 
for  the  Christian  life.  But  no  such  discrimi¬ 
nation  has  sharply  to  be  made.  Whatever 
inspiration  may  or  may  not  be,  there  was,  as 
will  be  suggested  in  another  lecture,  insight 
greater  than  can  be  described  as  a  majority 
vote  in  certain  councils,  in  the  selection, 
through  many  generations,  of  the  total  body 
of  literature  which  constitutes  the  Christian 
Bible;  and  the  Old  Testament  is  an  integral 
part  of  the  whole.  Neither  must  it  be  forgotten 
that  to  the  people  of  the  New  Testament  the 


“Moffatt,  The  Approach  to  the  New  Testament,  p.  30.  George  H.  Doran 
Company. 

46 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


Old  Testament  was  the  Bible.  “In  it  they 
found  their  credentials  for  the  past  and  their 
hopes  for  the  future— in  short,  the  explanation 
of  their  position  as  the  community  which 
looked  up  to  Jesus  Christ  as  the  final  revelation 
of  God’s  redeeming  purpose  in  history.”13 
Jesus  was  the  only  man,  as  another  modern 
scholar  suggests,  who  ever  had  the  right  to  lay 
the  Book  aside,  and  he  made  it  immortal. 

But  how,  in  this  rediscovered  religion,  are 
we  to  use  the  Bible  as  a  living  and  credible 
Scripture?  It  is  a  great  deal  more  difficult  to 
use  now  than  it  ever  was  before.  It  is  studied 
by  a  great  many  more  people  than  ever; 
scholarship  has  done  that  much  for  it.  What 
is  called  its  cultural  value  has  been  increasingly 
recognized;  what  is  known  as  its  ethical  signif¬ 
icance  is  more  acknowledged  and  quoted  than 
ever.  But  that  isn’t  all  the  story.  Its  appli¬ 
cation  has  been  directed  into  new  imperatives, 
its  meanings  have  been  related  to  new  enter¬ 
prises.  A  couple  of  generations  ago  Walter 
Savage  Landor  filled  five  volumes  with  Imag¬ 
inary  Conversations  between  famous  persons; 
they  are  read  with  pleasure  and  profit 
to-day.  But  the  most  celebrated  of  them  is 
not  as  interesting  as  would  be  a  conversa¬ 
tion  between  a  present-day  student  of  the 


**  Moffatt,  Op.  cit.,  p.  79. 


47 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


Bible  and  a  Puritan  preacher  of  the  days 
from  Cromwell  to  Cotton  Mather.  Your 
Puritan  read  the  prophets  to  find  the  doom 
of  kings  and  the  foreordinations  of  the  “majestic 
predestinating  God”;  the  modern  student  reads 
them  to  discern  the  principles  of  economic 
justice.  Your  Puritan  was  not  as  much  at 
home  in  the  New  Testament  as  he  might  have 
been,  but  when  he  read  the  Gospels  it  was  to 
discover,  what  the  preaching  of  Samuel  Ruther¬ 
ford  disclosed,  “the  loveliness  of  Christ”;  the 
modern  student  reads  them  to  disentangle 
their  social  meanings  and  to  construct  a  program 
of  the  church,  applicable  to  the  industrial  and 
political  conditions  of  the  time.  One  of  the 
speakers  at  a  recent  conference  on  the  applica¬ 
tion  of  Christianity  to  the  social  order  said, 
“I  know  of  no  socialist  whose  program  has  not 
been  better  stated  by  Jesus  Christ”;  yet  Christ 
was  no  socialist,  and  was  never  confronted 
with  anything  like  the  political  and  industrial 
conditions  of  to-day. 

Within  the  church,  our  latest  developments 
of  the  idea  of  religious  education,  with  our 
teacher-training  activities,  have  given  new 
impetus  to  an  old  but  still  practical  incentive 
to  the  reading  of  the  Bible.  Here,  also,  the 
prophets  are  searched  for  their  social  messages 
and  the  New  Testament  for  its  principles  of 

48 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


economic  and  political  action,  and  nothing 
more  distinguishes  the  modern  church  school 
from  the  Sunday  school  of  former  days  than 
the  extent  to  which  the  social  interpretation 
of  the  Bible  has  become  the  new  but  effective 
tradition  of  religious  pedagogy.  With  these 
more  scientific  and  productive  ideals  and  uses 
of  the  Bible,  nevertheless,  an  old  purpose 
dominates  a  not  inconsiderable  body  of  Bible 
readers,  namely,  that  they  may  have  some¬ 
thing  to  teach.  That,  as  need  not  be  argued, 
is  the  peril  of  preachers.  We  are  so  intent 
upon  texts  that  we  sometimes  miss  the  personal 
challenge.  We  are  so  straitened  to  preach, 
at  times,  that  we  get  from  the  Bible  something 
to  say  rather  than  something  to  know  and 
feel.  We  are  sometimes  so  familiar  with  it 
as  the  source  of  sermons  that  we  fail  to  find  it 
the  source  of  life. 

The  Bible  is  now  harder  to  read  aright  than 
ever.  It  requires  more  study  and  a  deeper 
apprehension  than  before.  But  when  we  shall 
have  rediscovered  religion  as  the  once  familiar 
experience  of  God  through  the  historic  and 
spiritual  Christ,  we  shall  learn  anew  that  the 
Bible  is  neither  a  treatise  nor  a  fetish,  but  a 
means  to  a  certain  end.  The  movement  for 
religious  education  is  an  indispensable  and 
saving  enterprise  of  the  churches  upon  which 

49 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


we  are  all  agreed,  and  no  one  will  deny  the 
inestimable  value  of  it  to  the  religious  life  of 
tomorrow;  but  there  is  one  fundamental  point 
of  view  which  must  be  increasingly  empha¬ 
sized.  It  is  the  point  of  view  disclosed  in 
Professor  Bowne’s  remark  that  people  do  not 
need  the  Bible  considered  as  a  book.  “They 
need  the  Christian  way  of  thinking  about  God 
and  his  purposes  concerning  men;  and  they  need 
the  Bible  only  as  it  helps  them  to  this  view’.”14 

To  us  our  learning  has  made  it  a  literature; 
to  our  fathers  it  was  the  Word  of  God.  We 
are  reading  it  to  discover  what  the  social  order 
should  become;  but  it  has  spoken  to  the  social 
order  only  as  men  have  read  it  to  discover, 
first,  what  they  themselves  ought  to  be.  We 
cannot  ignore  the  logic  of  Calvin,  that  the  way 
to  realize  Christianity  is  by  knowing  the  mind 
of  Christ;  and  that  this  mind  is  expressed  in 
the  Scriptures.  Thomas  Carlyle’s  mother  is 
said  to  have  written  to  him,  at  the  height  of 
his  erudition  and  fame,  “Tammie,  dinna  lose 
the  Word  in  the  learnin’.”  It  is  an  injunction 
profitably  to  be  remembered.  The  Bible  which 
discloses  the  mind  of  Christ  is  primarily  a  book 
of  intelligent  devotion  to  be  read  as  the  word 
of  God  to  the  growing  and  aspiring  soul. 
Christianity,  as  the  world  is  now  discovering, 


14  Bowne,  Christian  Revelation,  p.  15.  The  Methodist  Book  Concern. 

50 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


is  something  not  so  much  to  be  proved  as  to  be 
practiced;  and  looking  toward  the  practice  of 
it,  the  supreme  lack  of  Christian  men,  as  well 
as  of  those  not  Christian,  is  the  companionable 
sense  of  God.  The  Bible,  with  all  the  reasonable 
insights  and  reappraisals  which  historical  crit¬ 
icism  has  brought  to  it,  read  primarily  as  the 
uninterrupted  habit  of  the  devout  life,  will 
reclaim  and  sustain  that  companionable  sense 
of  God.  That  also  is  included  in  the  familiar 
country  of  rediscovered  Christianity. 

Ill 

On  an  earlier  page  it  was  remarked  that  only 
Christian  men  and  women  can  make  a  Christian 
society,  and  the  search  for  a  Christian  social 
order  is  really  a  search  for  the  Christian  men 
and  women  who  can  make  it.  But  what, 
meanwhile,  of  the  special  order  which  Christian 
men  and  women  already  constitute?  Rediscov¬ 
ering  the  data  of  religion  and  the  significance 
of  its  documents — the  Christian  experience  of 
God  and  the  devotional  use  of  the  Bible — 
what  about  its  organized  activities  and  asso¬ 
ciations?  What,  in  short,  about  the  church? 
That  is  an  inevitable  question  now.  It  is 
unnecessary  to  stress  the  unsatisfactory  position 
which  the  church  has  occupied  in  the  superficial 
thinking  of  the  age;  or  to  inquire  to  what  extent 

51 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


contemporary  dissatisfaction  with  the  church 
is  well  founded.  Perhaps  it  may  be  taken  that 
the  suggestion  made  by  the  author  of  Painted 
Windows  reflects  an  acute  diagnosis  of  the 
situation.  “It  is  not  the  voice  of  atheism  we 
hear;  it  is  the  voice  of  the  church  that  we 

*  55  1  K 

miss.  15 

Yet  the  assertion  can  be  made  with  little 
fear  of  denial  that  the  churches  were  never 
dealing  so  directly  or  practically  with  the 
everyday  conditions  of  human  life,  never  were 
they  speaking  with  more  intelligence  and 
insight  than  they  are  to-day.  But  Henry  J ames, 
returning  from  his  residence  in  England  to 
write  The  American  Scene ,  said:  “The  field  of 
American  life  is  as  bare  of  the  church  as  a 
billiard  table  of  a  center  piece;  a  truth  that 
the  myriad  little  structures  ‘attended*  on 
Sundays  and  on  the  ‘off*  evenings  of  their 
‘sociables’  proclaim  as  with  the  audible  sound 
of  the  roaring  of  a  million  mice.”16 

Of  course  no  one  in  America,  unless  he  be  of 
those  curious  humorists  who  call  themselves 
the  Young  Intellectuals,  needs  to  be  told  the 
provinciality  on  the  one  hand  and  the  exag¬ 
geration  on  the  other  in  that  remark.  Henry 
James  was  always  more  involved  in  his  style 

15  Painted  Windows,  p.  136.  Courtesy  of  G.  P.  Putnam’s  Sons,  Pub¬ 
lishers,  New  York  and  London. 

16  James,  The  American  Scene,  p.  367.  Harper  &  Brothers. 

52 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


than  accurate  in  his  insight.  But  that  the 
churches  of  America  should  have  made  so  little 
impression  even  on  him,  that  such  exaggeration 
was  possible  even  to  him,  carries  with  it  a 
measure  of  rebuke.  The  reason  for  it  would 
seem  to  be,  however,  not,  as  the  author  of 
Painted  Windows  supposes,  that  the  voice  of 
the  church  is  absent  but  that  men  do  not  hear 
it  speaking  what  it  ought  preeminently  to  say. 

For  the  primary  and  paramount  business  of 
the  church,  however  its  forms  may  change  and 
flow  like  water,  is  to  keep  the  Christian  society 
alive  to  that  sense  of  God  which  religious 
experience  inaugurates  in  the  individual  and 
which  the  devotional  use  of  the  Bible  main¬ 
tains.  The  church  is  the  only  institution 
which  can  do  that;  and  while  it  ought  to  initiate 
and  reenforce  a  multitude  of  “practical” 
enterprises,  if  amid  its  largest  success  in 
prosecuting  them  it  leaves  this  undone,  it  has 
failed,  as  a  church,  of  its  fundamental  purpose. 
The  church  must  insist,  through  its  forms, 
through  its  fellowships,  through  its  worship, 
through  its  educational  activities,  through  its 
pulpit  ministry  and  pastoral  service,  upon 
that  commerce  of  the  soul  with  God  which  no 
other  institution  can  ever  attempt;  and  by  as 
much  as  the  church  ceases  to  do  that,  among 
ever  so  many  worthful  practical  undertakings, 

53 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


as  Professor  Fitch  has  said,  “She  has  thereby 
given  up  her  real  excuse  for  being,  and  her 
peculiar  and  distinctive  mission  is  gone.”17 

One  must  admit  that  this  direction  of  thought 
goes  quite  opposite  to  much  of  the  modern 
critical  mood,  for  it  is  this  otherworldliness  of 
the  church  which  has  been  most  frequently 
and  severely  criticized.  Mr.  John  Galsworthy 
makes  one  of  the  characters  in  his  Saint's 
Progress  say  that  the  church  “stands  in  the 
dusk,  with  its  spire  to  a  heaven  which  exists 
no  more,  its  bells  still  beautiful  but  out  of  tune 
with  the  music  of  the  streets.”18  The  inference 
of  the  remark  is,  and  the  direct  charge  of  the 
general  criticism  which  beats  against  the  church 
to-day  is,  that  the  bells  ought  to  be  brought 
into  tune  with  the  streets.  But  they  never 
were.  When  Jesus  said,  “Whatsoever  ye  would 
that  men  should  do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to 
them,”  the  bells  of  the  spire  were  not  in  tune  with 
the  streets.  When  Paul  wrote  the  thirteenth 
chapter  of  First  Corinthians  the  bells  of  the 
spire  were  not  in  tune  with  the  streets.  When 
Saint  Augustine  published  his  City  of  God  amid 
the  calamities  of  the  barbarian  invasion  of 
Rome,  the  bells  of  the  spire  were  not  in  tune 
with  the  streets.  When  Wycliffe  translated, 

17  Fitch,  Preaching  and  Paganism,  p.  66.  Yale  University  Press. 

18  Galsworthy,  Saint's  Progress,  p.  179.  Charles  Scribner’s  Sons. 

54 


i 


REDISCOVERY  OF  RELIGION 


and  Luther  fought,  and  Wesley  proclaimed  the 
witness  of  the  Spirit,  the  bells  of  the  spire  were 
not  in  tune  with  the  streets.  It  is  a  very 
unpleasant  truth  which  Dean  Inge  not  long  ago 
announced,  but  it  is  a  truth  Christian  people 
have  to  face,  that  “If  we  ally  ourselves  with 
mankind  ‘in  the  loomp,’  we  shall  ally  ourselves 
with  mankind  at  its  worst.”19  The  church, 
retreating  not  so  much  as  a  step  from  the 
most  advanced  attempts  to  affect,  for  righteous¬ 
ness  and  equity,  the  social,  industrial,  and 
political  order,  has  yet,  as  its  supreme  business, 
to  make  real  and  effective  the  presence  of  God 
in  the  Christian  order.  The  music  of  the  streets 
must  tune  up  to  the  bells  in  the  spire. 

Rediscovering  religion,  then,  we  shall  find 
it  to  be  an  experience  of  God  rather  than  a 
propaganda  of  reform;  the  Bible,  through  its 
disclosures  as  literature,  a  breviary  of  devotion; 
and  the  church,  once  more,  “a  company  of 
men  having  the  form  and  seeking  the  power  of 
godliness.”  Rediscovering  that,  we  shall  find 
ourselves  at  the  very  springs  of  the  Christian¬ 
izing  of  the  social  order,  for  only  men  and 
women  so  experienced,  so  devout,  so  associated, 
can  become,  in  Bishop  Hughes’  fine  phrase, 
“eager  participants  in  earth’s  affairs  under  the 
sense  of  God.”  And  only  such  participants 


19  Inge,  The  Church  and  the  Age,  p.  77f.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

55 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


can  realize  the  Christianity  which  is  the  end 
and  purpose  of  all  our  present  social  enthusiasm. 
A  Christianity  which,  while  it  will  be,  first  of 
all,  an  experience  personally  within,  will  then, 
and  just  because  of  that,  become  a  sublime 
and  august  order  of  thought,  of  conduct,  of 
relationships,  at  one  with  justice,  with  democ¬ 
racy,  with  the  harmonious  interactions  of 
nations  and  the  effective  organization  of  society; 
at  one  also  with  the  spirit  of  all  good  institutions 
and  the  enforcement  of  all  good  laws;  a  sublime 
and  august  order  of  righteousness  as  inclusive 
as  humanity  and  as  durable  as  God. 


56 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 

I 

The  subject  of  the  former  chapter  will  serve 
as  a  reminder  of  another  contemporary  mood  in 
the  church  besides  that  which  is  demanding  a 
socialized  religion.  It  is  a  mood,  not  so 
prominent  in  the  published  propaganda  of  the 
churches  but  which  is  being  felt  nevertheless 
over  considerable  areas  of  the  church’s  life. 
It  is  that  temper  of  mind  and  feeling  which  is 
demanding  what  those  who  voice  the  demand 
call  “the  simple  gospel.”  In  revolt  from  the 
authority  with  which  modern  science  has 
invaded  the  evangel,  and  to  an  extent  deter¬ 
mines  its  form,  in  a  reaction  against  the  eru¬ 
dition  which  has  been  growing  into  the  liter¬ 
ature  of  scriptural  comment  and  exposition, 
in  a  half-confusion  before  the  multiplying 
volumes  in  which  religion  has  sought  to  secure 
and  use,  for  its  own  purposes,  the  findings  of 
psychology,  in  weariness  and  bewilderment 
from  the  new  vocabularies  of  the  social  enthu¬ 
siasm,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  movements 
of  religious  education,  on  the  other,  a  not 
inconsiderable  body  of  men  and  women  in  the 

57 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


church,  and  a  surprisingly  large  number  of 
men  and  women  outside  the  formal  activities 
of  the  church,  are  asking  of  the  pulpit  and 
claiming  to  seek  for  themselves  what  they 
describe  as  the  plain  faith  of  the  New  Testa¬ 
ment,  the  simple  gospel  of  the  past. 

It  sounds  like  a  reasonable  request,  but  when 
you  take  it  up  you  face  the  question  as  to  where 
you  will  find  the  simple  gospel  of  the  past  and 
the  plain  faith  of  the  New  Testament.  Not 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans,  surely;  nor  in  the 
second  chapter  of  Galatians,  nor  the  letter  to 
the  Ephesians,  nor  the  letter  to  the  Hebrews; 
nor  even  in  the  Gospel  of  John.  The  fact  is 
that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  the  simple  gospel. 
There  are  some  simple  steps  by  which  an 
inquiring  spirit  comes  to  apprehend  and  accept 
the  gospel;  but  when  you  try  to  put  into  lan¬ 
guage  the  Christian  tradition — how  the  infinite 
God  became  incarnate  in  the  human  Jesus,  and 
by  a  human  death  at  the  hands  of  a  judicial 
mob  and  a  military  guard  redeemed  the  race 
from  the  inexorabilities  of  sin — there  will  be 
nothing  simple  about  that  story.  What  has 
happened  is  simply  that  the  pulpit,  and  hence 
the  pew,  for  not  a  few  years  have  seized  on  the 
first  of  the  easily  understood  steps  which  the 
spirit  takes  in  accepting  the  gospel,  have  col¬ 
lected  a  few  simple  characteristics  of  the  divine 

58 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


life,  disconnected  from  the  profound  relation¬ 
ships  and  implications  which  give  them  meaning, 
and  have  called  the  collection  the  simple  gospel. 
And  it  may  be  said  that  there  are  few  perils 
more  subtly  menacing  the  church  to-day,  and 
more  impoverishing  the  spiritual  life  of  the 
Christian  world,  than  this  reiteration  of  rudi¬ 
mentary  and  disconnected  truths  to  the  exclusion 
of  the  greatening  intellectual  and  practical 
developments  therefrom. 

Because,  whatever  we  may  find  the  Christian 
experience  essentially  to  be,  our  experience  of 
it  we  recognize  in  the  presence  and  persistence 
of  certain  high  and  sustaining  emotions.  But 
the  error  into  which  large  numbers  of  good  men 
and  women  fall  is  that  of  failing  to  realize  that 
high  and  persistent  emotions  can  be  maintained 
only  by  the  exercise  of  high  and  persistent 
thought.  As  the  years  pass  and  they  come  to 
understand  this,  amid  the  pressure  of  life  and 
the  confusions  of  duty  men  and  women  find 
themselves  asking,  not  “What  must  I  do?”  or 
“What  do  I  feel?”  but  “What  can  I  believe?” 

When  one  begins  to  answer  that  question  he 
discovers  that  he  is  dealing  with  theology,  that 
discredited  enterprise,  which  our  generation 
long  since  put  out  of  the  door  only  to  have  it 
come  back  through  the  window.  With  that 
question  one  learns,  as  our  day  is  now  learning, 

59 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


that  the  stress  of  events,  the  bitterness  of  the 
industrial  strife,  the  economic  blunders  and 
injustices  throughout  the  world,  the  political 
betrayals  which  have  plunged  it  into  poverty 
and  violence,  the  recurrent  beat  of  sorrow, 
suffering,  and  despair,  are  all  too  much  for  the 
easy-going  sentiments  which  men  have  mis¬ 
named  liberality,  and  for  the  fragments  of 
religious  tradition  and  custom  which  they 
call  the  simple  gospel.  Neither  sentiment  nor 
fragments  are  now  enough  for  the  souls  of  men. 
Only  indubitable  and  commanding  verities, 
only  impregnable  insights,  will  meet  the  neces¬ 
sities  of  the  hour.  What  is  the  whole  of 
Christianity?  That  is  the  world’s  desperate 
question  to-day.  We  have  had  enough  of 
aspects,  rudiments,  and  phases;  we  must  return 
to  an  articulated  body  of  sustaining  and 
defensible  and  productive  belief. 

Right  at  the  very  beginning  of  what  I  have 
in  mind  to  say  there  are,  of  course,  some 
misunderstandings  to  be  precluded.  When 
we  speak  of  theology  we  do  not  mean,  for 
instance,  any  sharp-tongued  discussion  of  those 
secondary  interests  which,  in  the  past,  too  often 
developed  opinions  into  prejudices  and  became 
barriers  to  Christian  fellowship.  That  vital 
theology  to  which  we  have  now  to  return, 
toward  which  the  world  of  thinking  men  and 

60 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


women  is  now  groping,  will  be  no  propaganda 
of  differences  but  a  reasonable  and  open- 
minded  exploration  of  the  meaning  of  our 
common  religious  experience.  As  in  the  ancient 
days  of  Israel,  when,  as  it  is  written,  every  man 
did  that  which  seemed  good  in  his  own  eyes, 
there  was  no  nation  but  only  a  loose  collection 
of  feeble  and  desolated  clans;  so  in  our  recent 
years,  when  every  man  has  thought  about 
religious  values  as  seemed  good  in  his  own 
eyes,  though  for  lack  of  knowledge  and  dis¬ 
cipline  few  had  the  conveniences  for  accurate 
thinking,  Protestantism  has  lacked  coherence, 
and  consequently  both  the  sense  and  the  impact 
of  power.  The  theological  thinking  and 
discussion  which  have  been  a  discrimination  of 
differences  rather  than  an  exposition  of  our 
spiritual  commonwealth  have  too  frequently 
led  to  men’s  becoming  more  interested  in 
defending  their  differences  than  in  discerning 
the  truth;  so  that,  as  Dr.  George  A.  Gordon 
has  remarked,  “There  has  been  an  astonishing 
amount  of  lying  .  .  .  done  in  the  supposed 
interest  of  the  glory  of  God.”1 

Then,  again,  when  we  speak  of  returning  to 
theology,  we  do  not  mean  to  return  to  all  the 
formal  language  in  which  the  stiff  old  days 


1  Gordon,  Aspects  of  the  Infinite  Mystery,  p.  58.  Houghton  Mifflin 
Company. 

61 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


expressed,  and  frequently  concealed,  their 
thoughts.  What  Bishop  McDowell  wrote  with 
a  twinkle  in  his  eye  can  be  remembered  with  a 
shadow  in  the  heart:  “An  ordinary  saint  is  not 
sure  he  wants  to  be  saved  when  he  hears  the 
theological  name  for  salvation,  or  live  forever 
when  he  hears  the  theological  term  for  the 
doctrine  of  the  future  life.”2  We  have  no 
interest  to-day  in  the  repetition  of  ancient 
religious  language  but  in  the  return  to  the 
sources  of  growing  religious  life. 

Once  more,  when  we  come  back  to  an  intelli¬ 
gent  interest  in  theology,  we  are  returning,  not 
merely  to  an  intellectual  exercise  but  to  very 
effective  participation  in  practical  affairs. 
Every  religious  movement  in  the  past,  which 
has  accomplished  vital  and  permanent  changes 
in  social  and  national  life,  has  begun  in  the 
declaration  of,  and  popular  enthusiasm  for, 
theological  doctrines.  The  pre-reformation  in 
Bohemia,  the  Lutheran  Reformation  in  Ger¬ 
many,  the  Wesleyan  Revival  in  England,  the 
Great  Awakening  in  America — one  by  one  you 
can  name  the  transforming  spiritual  movements 
and  discover  them  to  have  had  their  roots  in 
new  theological  apprehensions. 

Notwithstanding  the  much-emphasized  fact 


*  McDowell,  Good  Ministers  of  Jesus  Christ,  p.  91.  The  Abingdon 
Press. 

62 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


that  the  teachings  of  Jesus,  as  recorded  in  the 
Gospels,  are  expressed  in  language  quite  re¬ 
moved  from  what  we  know  as  theological 
phraseology,  fundamentally  every  Christian 
belief  is  theological.  You  can  fail  to  recognize 
theology,  but  you  cannot  evade  it  and  be 
Christian.  Some  twenty  years  ago  the  author 
of  a  book  widely  read  at  the  time  said  of  Jesus 
that  “He  came  not  to  elaborate  a  system  of 
theology  or  ethics,  but  to  introduce  himself  to 
men’s  minds  and  hearts,  and  left  men  with  the 
question,  not,  ‘What  think  ye  of  this  doctrine 
or  that  principle?’  but  ‘What  think  ye  of 
Christ?’  ”3  Rut  when  you  ask  “What  think 
ye  of  Christ?”  you  are  asking  the  profoundest 
and  most  far-reaching  question  which  theology 
knows.  When  some  saint  says  simply,  “I 
believe  in  Christ;  that  is  all  the  theology  I 
need,”  the  saint  has  to  go,  in  fact,  a  great  deal 
further  than  he  admits  in  speech.  He  has  to 
take  for  granted  a  great  deal  more  than  he 
investigates.  Who  is  this  Christ  in  whom  he 
believes,  and  what  kind  of  Person  and  charac¬ 
ter  is  he  from  whom  these  nineteen  centuries 
of  Christendom  have  risen?  The  simplest 
statement  of  Christian  experience  involves  you 
in  the  entire  theological  order.  John  Wesley 
was  putting  it  as  simply  as  he  knew  when  he 


8  Simpson,  The  Fact  of  Christ,  p.  17.  Fleming  H.  Revell  Company. 

63 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


defined  the  witness  of  the  Spirit  as  “an  imme¬ 
diate  impression  on  the  soul,  whereby  the 
Spirit  of  God  directly  witnesses  to  my  spirit 
that  I  am  a  child  of  God,  that  Jesus  Christ 
has  loved  me,  and  given  himself  for  me,  and 
that  all  my  sins  are  blotted  out,  and  I,  even  I, 
am  reconciled  to  God.”  Looked  at  closely, 
one  discovers  that  this  classic  definition,  every 
word  of  which  is  immediately  comprehensible 
by  the  most  limited  intelligence,  is  really  a 
figure  of  speech  involving  acceptance  of  the 
body  of  Christian  doctrine.  Or  take  the 
commoner  expressions  of  experience  and  deci¬ 
sion  to  be  heard  in  the  unstudied,  untheo- 
logical  gatherings  of  Christian  people:  I  have 
accepted  Christ  as  my  Saviour!  I  have  been 
saved  from  my  sins!  The  Lordship  of  Jesus! 
They  mean  nothing  that  is  not  theological. 
What  kind  of  Being  is  this  Christ  who  is 
accepted  as  Saviour?  How  does  he  save? 
What  is  implied  in  the  phrase  “saved  from”? 
The  moment  one  goes  below  the  surface  of  his 
phraseology  to  understand  what  his  words 
mean  he  is  at  close  grips  with  theology. 

In  his  great  story  of  Belgium  under  the 
German  occupation  Mr.  Brand  Whitlock  tells 
of  a  man  who  greatly  annoyed  the  American 
Legation  with  his  demands  for  protection,  and 
describes  him  as  having  the  type  of  mind  which 

G4 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


confuses  words  with  acts,  and  thinks  that 
problems  have  been  solved  when  the  words 
describing  them  have  been  discovered.  Prot¬ 
estantism,  to  say  nothing  of  Methodism,  has 
been  seriously  enfeebled  by  the  prevalence  of 
that  type  of  mind  in  respect  of  religious  inter¬ 
ests.  It  is  that  type  of  mind  which,  having  no 
theological  instruction  from  the  practical  and 
undoc trinal  pulpit  of  the  last  generation,  and 
no  theological  apprehension  of  its  own  expe¬ 
rience,  has  gone  out  into  the  extravagances  of 
Premillennialism,  has  turned  back  into  what  it 
miscalls  Fundamentalism,  and  has  become  a 
prey  to  Christian  Science  and  other  vagaries 
based  upon  dramatic  but  fragmentary  aspects 
of  truth.  A  sound  theology,  as  has  been 
remarked  many  times,  is  the  only  safeguard 
against  insidious  superstition. 

There  will  be  no  denial  of  what  has  just  been 
said;  but,  for  the  sake  of  illustration,  let  us 
follow  this  a  little  further.  Dealing  now  with 
the  substance  of  common  experience,  not  the 
materials  of  intellectual  disagreement,  think 
for  a  moment  concerning  the  fact  of  sin.  Per¬ 
haps  from  no  item  of  traditional  Christian 
belief  has  our  generation  traveled  further,  in 
practical  effect,  than  it  has  traveled  from  the 
elder  conception  of  sin.  It  is  at  this  point 
that  one  can  observe  the  sharpest  paradox  of 

65 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

modern  religious  life.  It  has  come  to  empha¬ 
size  overwhelmingly,  in  sentiment  and  word, 
the  infinite  love  of  God,  and  in  practice  to 
ignore,  to  equally  great  extent,  the  fact  of  sin; 
yet  the  love  of  God  is  apparently  contradicted 
by  nature,  by  history,  and  by  a  good  deal  of 
experience,  and  the  fact  of  sin  can  be  found  on 
every  hand.  If  preachers  have  not  grown 
silent  about  sin,  as  has  been  sometimes  charged, 
even  men  who  employ  the  old  vocabularies 
seem  to  have  lost  some  of  the  old  vehemence 
in  condemnation  of  it.  It  does  not  seem  to 
impress  our  generation  as  being  anything  like 
as  bad  as  it  used  to  be,  and  the  older  sanctities 
have  almost  given  way  to  a  modern  amiability. 
It  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  the 
rank  and  file  of  Christian  society  appraises  sin, 
not  by  the  august  standard  of  the  ancient 
moral  law,  but  by  the  shifting  social  customs 
of  the  changing  hour.  Personal  sin  has  nothing 
of  the  former  sting  and  terror  in  it.  Some  sins 
are  taboo  because  they  are  counted  vulgar,  and 
some  are  not  tolerated  because  of  their  embar¬ 
rassing  effects;  but  the  sinister  menace  of  sin 
no  longer  threatens  life.  Nearly  thirty  years 
ago  R.  W.  Dale  felt  the  change  and  wrote  a 
diagnosis  which  the  years  since  then  have 
increasingly  confirmed.  The  religious  life  as  he 
knew  it,  he  said,  “has  commonly  originated  in 

66 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


a  sense  of  the  loneliness  of  the  soul  that  has  not 
found  God;  or  of  the  incompleteness  of  life 
when  there  is  no  distinct  vision  of  its  infinite 
horizon;  or  it  has  sprung  from  a  desire  to  reach 
a  perfection  which  is  inaccessible  apart  from 
the  divine  power  and  grace;  or  there  has  been 
a  great  sorrow,  and  the  heart  has  turned 
to  God  for  consolation;  or  the  authority  of 
Christ  has  appealed  to  conscience  and  has 
constrained  the  submission  of  the  will;  or  a 
man  has  discovered  that  the  religious  faith  of 
his  wife  or  his  child  or  his  friend  is  the  source 
of  a  power  and  elevation  and  peace  which  he 
thinks  he  would  like  to  possess;  or  there  has 
been  a  vague  impression  that  there  would  come 
to  him,  in  answer  to  trust  in  Christ  and  to 
prayer,  and  as  the  result  of  the  persistent 
endeavors  to  do  Christ’s  will,  some  great, 
undefined,  and  unknown  good.  But  in  com¬ 
paratively  few  instances  has  it  seemed  to  me 
that  there  was  any  keen  sense  of  the  guilt  of 
sin — as  distinguished  from  the  evil  of  sin — or 
any  vehement  desire  for  God’s  pardon.”4 

Now,  neither  the  Bible  nor  our  actual  life 
knows  any  such  softening  of  the  fierce  edge  of 
sin’s  reality.  In  both  the  Bible  and  life  it  is 
written  that  sin  is  sin,  and  that  the  wages  of  sin 
is  death.  It  is  something  more  than  a  violation 

*  Dale,  Christian  Doctrine,  p.  252.  George  H.  Doran  Company. 

67 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


of  social  custom.  It  is  something  more  than  an 
explosion  of  animal  instinct.  It  is  something 
more  than  an  error  in  judgment.  It  is  some- 
thing  more  than  a  disharmony  in  human  rela¬ 
tionships.  It  is  a  profound  and  productive 
energy,  real  enough  and  constant  enough  to 
have  distorted  history  and  deflected  society 
from  its  affirmed  ideals  and  wrought  in  indi¬ 
viduals  and  groups  irreparable  tragedies  of 
agony  and  despair.  If  you  take  the  Christian 
attitude  expressed  in  the  New  Testament  and 
say  that  Christ  died  for  sin,  then  you  have 
another  standard;  and  the  higher  you  evaluate 
Christ,  the  more  real  and  enormous  sin  is. 

Nevertheless  not  a  few  minds  are  inquiring 
whether  we  ought  not  to  ignore  this  older  and 
threatening  conception  of  sin,  and  stress  the 
happier  and  more  wholesome  elements  in  ex¬ 
perience  and  life.  It  is  not  necessary  to  indicate 
the  directions  from  which  they  are  influenced 
to  such  an  attitude,  nor  the  unsoundness  of 
the  philosophy  on  which  their  attitude  takes 
its  stand.  It  will  be  more  pertinent  to  remind 
you  that  what  a  man  thinks  about  sin  will 
determine  what  he  thinks  about  everything 
else.  If  sin  is  a  trifle  to  him,  whatever  he 
considers  the  equivalent  of  salvation  will  be 
no  larger;  you  cannot  have  a  great  deliverance 
from  a  small  danger.  If  sin,  for  instance,  is 

68 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 

a  matter  of  animal  inheritance,  or  violated 
race  custom,  or  mistaken  judgment,  then 
repentance  can  be  no  more  than  a  rather  formal 
reaction.  If  sin,  whatever  one  considers  it, 
may  be  ignored  in  the  interest  of  an  optimistic 
ethical  emphasis,  then  Jesus  was  a  Hebrew 
Don  Quixote,  and  the  crucifixion  was  a  lynching 
party.  What  one  thinks  about  sin  will  deter¬ 
mine  what  he  thinks  about  men.  If  sin  is  a 
social  accident  which  can  be  disregarded,  then 
justice  is  a  social  fad  which  may  be  neglected. 
If  the  sense  of  sin  is  something  of  race  memory 
surviving  the  withdrawal  of  primitive  inhibi¬ 
tions,  then  babies  slaughtered  by  impure  milk 
and  gutter  fevers,  children  driven  through  the 
mills  into  tuberculosis  and  premature  graves, 
men  and  women  broken  on  the  wheel  of  unsocial 
industry,  populations  swept  by  violence  and 
preventable  famine,  signify  no  more  than 
opportunities  for  political  expedients.  Here 
lies  one  of  the  perils  of  the  present  social  enter¬ 
prise  and  passion  of  the  church  which,  of  late 
years,  has  substituted  sociology  for  theology 
and  retired  doctrinal  preaching  in  favor  of 
card-index  systems,  namely,  that,  as  Doctor 
Jowett  suggested  in  his  Yale  Lectures,  it  will 
emphasize  reform  rather  than  redemption,  and 
while  lifting  the  rod  of  oppression  will  still 
leave  the  burden  of  guilt.  What  men  think 

69 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


about  sin  will  reflect  what  they  think  about 
God.  If  sin  isn’t  the  most  terrible  reality  in 
the  universe;  if  not  what  men  are  doing  but 
what  they  are  becoming  isn’t  the  most  fateful 
element  in  our  social  disorder  and  strife;  if  not 
to  have  lost  one’s  rights  but  to  have  kept  one’s 
wrongs  isn’t  the  worst  moral  disaster  in  the 
world,  then  right  relationship  with  God  is  not 
nearly  as  important  as  we  have  thought,  and 
the  New  Testament  insistence  upon  it  is  a 
misplaced  emphasis. 

Or,  at  the  other  extreme  of  doctrinal  thinking 
there  are  the  fact  and  character  of  God,  and  all 
life  depends  upon  what  one  thinks  about  him. 
Right  thinking  about  God  would  have  saved 
multitudes  of  men  and  women  their  fortitude, 
their  consolation,  their  hope  and  peace,  during 
the  catastrophes  of  war  and  pestilence  which 
have  wrecked  the  faith  of  so  many.  For  a 
generation  we  have  been  drifting  in  a  flabby 
reliance  upon  the  unexamined  tenderness  of 
God,  and  his  holiness  has  been  almost  lost.  We 
have  stumbled  over  the  thought  of  his  power 
because  we  have  obscured  his  righteousness. 
We  have  tried  to  explain  what  he  has  been 
doing  while  we  paid  no  attention  to  what  he 
must  be.  Thinking  of  God  in  mediaeval  terms, 
as  an  absolute  monarch,  the  wreckage  of  society 
has  given  unpublished  atheism  new  life;  think- 

70 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


ing  of  him  as  the  Great  Democrat,  laboring  with 
a  free  people  in  the  struggle  for  a  perfect  social 
order,  will  bring  back  a  faith  as  effective  as  it 
will  be  buoyant.  But  a  good  many  men  and 
women  will  have  to  think  more  seriously  and 
in  more  orderly  fashion  than  they  have  been 
doing.  Rabbi  Duncan,  that  famous  Scotch 
scholar-preacher  who  thought  his  way  from 
agnosticism  to  Christian  experience,  said  that 
when  he  knew  there  was  a  God  he  “danced 
upon  the  brig  o’  Dee  with  delight.9’  There 
will  likewise  be  no  exuberance  of  spirit,  no 
rejoicing  by  the  world  of  our  generation,  after 
these  bleak  experiences  through  which  it  has 
gone  and  the  bewilderments  in  which  it  now 
labors,  until  it  also  knows  once  more  that  there 
is  a  God,  and  knows  what  kind  of  God  he  is. 
What  is  thus  true  of  the  idea  of  and  belief  in 
God  is  also  true  of  those  other  judgments  which 
go  to  the  making  of  Christian  faith  and  hope. 
They  must  be  given  precision  and  form — in  a 
word,  they  must  be  formulated  in  reasonable 
and  consistent  definition  in  order  to  safeguard 
and  direct  experience. 

II 

Undoubtedly,  there  is  now  a  protest  waiting 
to  present  itself  against  the  immediate  impli¬ 
cations  of  what  has  just  been  said.  It  is  a 

71 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

protest  very  popular  with  those  volatile  minds 
which,  with  the  utmost  sincerity  and  devotion 
of  purpose,  are  more  progressive  in  spirit  than 
careful  in  their  estimates  of  the  actualities  of 
progress.  It  is  a  protest  phrased  in  the  words 
of  a  speaker  who  said  not  long  ago,  according 
to  printed  report,  “We  are  convinced  that  .  .  . 
saying  the  old  words  is  not  going  to  be  sufficient 
to  catch  the  attention  or  command  the  respect 
of  our  bewildered  fellow  men.” 

That  is  a  statement  to  be  classified  as  inter¬ 
esting  but  not  wholly  true.  It  depends  on 
what  the  old  words  are  and  what  meaning  one 
puts  into  them.  The  word  “Liberty,”  for 
example,  is  a  very  old  word.  It  stirred  pro¬ 
foundly  the  noblest  spirits  of  the  Greek  world. 
It  sustained  the  exodus  of  Semitic  bondsmen 
from  their  Egyptian  servitude.  It  was  the 
boast  of  Roman  citizenship  in  its  days  of  pride 
and  power.  It  woke  the  sleeping  heroism  of 
later  Latin  peoples,  and  produced  the  Italian 
republics,  and,  still  later,  united  Italy.  It 
wove  a  crown  of  sacrifice  and  independence 
for  the  Swiss  cantons.  It  drenched  France  in 
blood  and  terror,  and  brought  into  being  a  new 
era.  It  inspired  the  foundation  of  the  Amer¬ 
ican  republic.  It  is  a  fairly  old  word,  but  it 
still  moves  humanity  as  modern  terminologies, 
such  as  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat,  with 

72 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 

which  the  speaker  quoted  seemed  somewhat 
sympathetic,  have  so  far  failed  to  do.  The 
word  4 'Justice”  is  a  very  old  word.  It  was  the 
foundation  of  the  civil  economy  of  the  Hebrew 
state,  the  constant  theme  of  Greek  thinking, 
the  organized  passion  of  Rome  in  her  greatest 
contribution  to  the  life  of  civilization.  It 
inspired  the  social  energy  of  mediaeval  England; 
was  the  slogan  of  the  French  Revolution;  and 
is  now  the  battle  cry  of  the  forces  of  reconstruc¬ 
tion  and  reform  moving  upon  our  present 
discredited  social  system.  4 'Brotherhood 55  is  a 
very  old  word.  It  came  with  a  strange,  new 
winsomeness  from  the  lips  of  Jesus;  it  awakened 
deep  and  far  hopes  in  the  disadvantaged  folks 
of  ancient  and  oppressed  orders,  and  is  to-day 
the  bugle  music  and  marching  song  of  the  Inter¬ 
nationale.  New  words  sometimes  catch  atten¬ 
tion,  but  they  do  not  command  respect  until 
they  have  become,  in  a  manner,  old;  it  is  the 
old  words,  properly  intended  and  understood, 
that  capture  men.  “God”  is  a  very  old  word, 
and  none  of  the  new  words  of  either  science  or 
modern  sects  has  brought  men  more  respect 
for  the  reality  which  it  adumbrates.  “Right¬ 
eousness”  is  an  old  word,  but  men  are  striving 
more  earnestly  than  ever  to  realize  its  content. 
“Sacrifice”  is  a  very  old  word  and  it  is  becoming 
more  vitalized  every  day. 

73 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


We  shall  be  safeguarding  ourselves  from  the 
isolation  in  which  a  sharp  disregard  for  the  old 
words  would  involve  us,  if  we  substitute  for 
the  remark  quoted  above  the  more  restrained 
and  truer  observation  of  Dr.  Robert  Bruce 
Taylor,  that  “we  are  in  an  atmosphere  which 
tends  more  and  more  to  utter  its  faith  in  the 
language  of  the  day.”5  This  is  true,  of  course, 
because  the  language  of  the  day  springs  from 
and  expresses  knowledge,  experience,  and  ideal 
which  earlier  days  had  not  acquired;  and  the¬ 
ology  must  react  and  relate  itself  to  that  newer 
knowledge,  experience,  and  ideal.  Earlier  in 
the  chapter  it  was  remarked  that  any  vital 
theology  to  which  we  would  return  would  be  a 
reasonable  and  open-minded  exploration,  not 
of  our  individual  and  isolated  feelings,  but  of 
our  common  religious  experience.  We  cannot, 
therefore,  disregard  whatever  enriching  and 
modifying  influences  have  marked  our  modern 
life. 

Of  these  influences  which  must  be  considered 
and  appraised  in  our  reformulations  of  theology, 
two  are  undeniably  evident:  the  influence  of 
modern  science  and  the  influence  of  democracy, 
rather,  of  the  modern  passion  for  democracy. 
Widely  different  as  these  enterprises  of  the 

5  Christianity  and  Problems  of  To-day ,  p.  51.  (Broas  Lectures  for  1921.) 
Charles  Scribner’s  Sons,  publishers. 

74 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


modern  spirit  are,  in  kind  and  in  the  sphere  of 
their  effects,  they  are  alike  in  that  they  have 
radically  altered  our  modes  of  thinking  and 
some  of  our  standards  of  social  and  religious 
value.  Both  are  permanent  factors  in  human 
experience,  and  the  most  sacred  and  ancient 
conceptions  of  truth  must  be  intelligibly  ad¬ 
justed  to  the  new  realities  of  existence  and 
relationship  which  they  have  revealed  and, 
doubtless,  will  continue  to  disclose.  In  re¬ 
turning  to  theology  then,  to  put  it  into  more 
definite  outlines,  we  shall  come  by  way  of 
comparative  religions  and  the  Scriptures  as 
historical  criticism  presents  them,  in  spite  of 
the  Fundamentalists;  and  by  way  of  the  natural 
and  mental  sciences,  notwithstanding  Mr. 
Bryan  and  his  intellectual  contemporary,  Arch¬ 
bishop  Ussher. 

It  need  not  be  argued  that  the  function  of 
religion,  of  Christianity,  to  be  explicit,  is  not 
primarily  to  furnish  a  reasonable  explanation 
of  our  experiences  in  time,  and  of  history  which 
is  the  record  of  the  race’s  experiences  in  time; 
that  lies  within  the  province  of  philosophy. 
The  function  of  religion  is  to  furnish  a  reason¬ 
able  support  to  the  human  spirit  and  a  reason¬ 
able  expectation  of  personal  and  social  destiny, 
so  that  the  individual  and  the  race  may  endure, 
on  the  one  hand,  the  experiences  they  cannot 

75 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


explain,  and,  on  the  other,  may  labor  intelli¬ 
gently  to  correct  those  maladjustments  of 
relationship  and  purpose  from  which  the 
untoward  experiences  so  generally  spring. 
Theology,  in  other  words,  must  be  related  to 
and  developed  in  contact  with  our  actual 
life. 

If  now,  one  reads,  the  literature  through 
which  the  significant  moods  of  our  day  express 
themselves;  if  he  appraises  the  characteristic 
conversation  of  men  and  women  intelligently 
immersed  in  life;  if  one  takes  serious  account 
of  the  contagious  and  emotional,  rather  than 
reasoned,  interests  which  occupy,  from  time 
to  time,  the  attention  of  apparently  large 
numbers  of  people;  he  will  find  it  difficult  not  to 
recognize  at  least  three  quite  clearly  defined 
needs,  both  social  and  personal,  which  have 
been  developed  by  the  stress  and  revolution  of 
the  period.  There  may  be  differences,  of 
course,  in  the  value  which  different  observers 
attach  to  the  various  aspects  of  such  a  social 
diagnosis,  but,  broadly  speaking,  there  are 
three  social  and  personal  needs  of  to-day  to 
which  religion  must  speak  with  authority;  and 
with  the  authority,  not  of  a  traditional  insti¬ 
tution,  but  of  reasonable  conviction  and  truth; 
not  in  ever  so  moving  but  transient  appeals 
to  what  we  call  the  better  feelings,  but  in  a 

76 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


durable  capture  of  intelligence  and  will.  Reli¬ 
gion  can  thus  speak  with  permanent  effect 
only  through  theological  expressions  of  truth; 
in  other  words,  only  a  living  theology  can  meet 
these  contemporary  and  living  needs. 

First  is  the  need,  both  personal  and  social, 
for  the  sense  of  historical  continuity.  Ever 
since  the  Great  War  began  men  have  thought 
and  spoken  of  it  as  cutting  them  off  sharply  from 
the  natural  and  comfortable  past.  They  still 
call  it  a  chasm  closing  in  catastrophe  a  great 
and  understood  and  satisfactory,  if  mistaken, 
age.  Multitudes  who  have  not  tried  to  put 
into  formal  language  their  fears  and  convictions, 
nevertheless  feel  and  act  as  if  the  whole  world 
of  orderly  relationships,  established  values,  and 
certain  hopes,  in  which  they  dwelt  at  ease 
before  the  war,  has  gone  forever — as,  indeed, 
it  has.  Their  inarticulate  sense  of  its  removal 
has  colored  their  entire  outlook  and  estimate 
of  the  present  time,  of  society,  and  of  the  world 
itself.  They  had  been  at  home  in  the  atmos¬ 
phere  of  development,  and  history  was  to  them  a 
record  of  advance  and  a  prophecy  of  constant 
progress.  But  the  war,  its  violence  and  evil, 
its  disclosure  of  the  savage  instincts  still 
untamed  in  man,  its  wreckage  of  institutions, 
its  revelation  of  class  and  racial  hates,  all  have 
seemed  to  deny  the  axiom  on  which  hitherto 

77 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


they  had  lived.  The  world,  they  have  come 
to  feel,  underneath  its  achievements  in  mechan¬ 
ical  contrivances  and  the  instruments  of  com¬ 
fort,  is  not  developing;  it  is  only  repeating 
itself.  What  they  had  thought  was  progress  is 
only  motion  in  a  circle.  The  one  indistinct  but 
glorious  far-off,  divine  event  to  which  Tennyson 
taught  them  the  whole  creation  moved  has 
given  place  to  undirected,  incalculable,  contra¬ 
dictory  energies — natural,  social,  personal — and 
all  of  caprice;  so  that  their  world,  once  so 
secure,  is  hopelessly  adrift,  and  life  walks  un¬ 
regarded  the  weary  ways  of  men.  So  that 
particularly  men  need  again  the  sustaining  sense 
of  continuity  with  a  durable  and  triumphant 
past,  not  merely  in  its  social  evolutions,  but, 
preeminently,  in  its  moral  certitudes.  It  is 
that  alone  which  will  save  them  from  what  has 
been  called  the  irony  of  individualism  which,  in 
spite  of  much  social  utterance,  is  still  a  fatality 
in  present-day  thought  and  feeling. 

To  this  need  for  continuity  comes  now  the 
Christian  doctrine  of  the  incarnation  of  God  in 
the  historic  Jesus.  After  him  history  can  never 
be  other  than  an  unbreakable  movement,  and, 
regardless  of  the  interruptions  of  human  vio¬ 
lence  and  passion,  moral  progress  is  the  very 
essence  of  the  life  of  man.  It  is  not  the  province 
of  this  chapter  to  expound  any  theological 

78 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


dogma,  and  hence  it  will  be  enough  simply  to 
name  this  doctrine  of  the  incarnation  as  the 
church’s  answer  to  the  present  hour’s  demand 
and  need  for  the  sense  of  historical  continuity. 
Yet  it  will  not  be  amiss  to  say  that  not  a  few 
minds  to-day — and  the  author  is  ready  to 
confess  his  sympathy  with  them — are  ready  to 
go  back  to  the  conception  of  the  incarnation 
which  the  great  Greeks  held,  before  that 
conception  had  been  distorted  by  the  Latin 
theologians  in  the  interest  of  the  temporal 
supremacy  of  an  imperial  church.  It  is  the 
conception  of  the  incarnation  not  as  God’s 
afterthought  to  rescue  a  world  which  had  gone 
hopelessly  from  him,  but  as  God’s  original 
self-disclosure  of  the  world  as  eternally  his — 
the  Lamb  slain  from  its  foundation — and  with 
good  enough  at  its  heart  to  provide  the  arena 
and  the  exhibition  of  his  divine  character  in 
terms  of  human  experience  and  life. 

A  second  need,  clamorous  now  amid  the 
stress  and  revolution  of  the  times,  is  the  need  for 
confidence — confidence  in  the  value  of  human 
life,  its  ideals,  its  energies,  and  the  world  of  har¬ 
monious  social  relationships  toward  which  it 
labors.  This,  as  will  be  immediately  recog¬ 
nized,  is  easily  akin  to  the  need  for  the  sense 
of  continuity.  As  Dean  Inge  has  written, 
“Ignorance  of  the  past  and  indifference  to  the 

79 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


future  generally  go  together.”6  There  is  to¬ 
day,  as  has  already  been  observed,  a  vast  pes¬ 
simism  in  the  minds  of  men,  a  skepticism  of  the 
worth  and  permanence  of  our  social  orders, 
of  the  significance  of  our  human  struggles, 
of  the  reasonableness  of  our  more  generous 
and  inspiring  ideals.  The  author  of  Painted 
Windows  has  written  of  Bishop  Gore  that 
“He  has  the  look  of  one  whose  head  has  long 
been  thrust  out  of  a  window  gloomily  expecting 
an  accident  to  happen  at  the  street  corner.”7 
That  is  the  attitude  of  much  of  our  present- 
day  world;  only  the  accident  has  already 
happened  and  there  can  be  no  future  for  the 
wreckage  except  rubbish.  That  is  the  attitude 
of  minds  so  widely  dissimilar  that  the  condition 
is  all  the  more  serious.  It  is  the  attitude  of 
the  agnostic  wing  of  society,  cynically  adjust¬ 
ing  itself  to  make  the  hopeless  best  of  a  lost 
situation.  It  is  the  attitude  of  multitudes 
of  men  and  women  still  struggling  to  hold 
their  faith  amid  the  currents  of  disillu¬ 
sionment  and  defeat.  It  is  the  attitude  of 
the  thoroughgoing  premillennialists,  rejoicing 
turbulently  at  the  good  news  that  the  world 
has  gone  to  the  devil,  and  that  Christ,  whose 
cross  has  failed,  is  on  his  way  to  end  the 

6  Inge,  Outspoken  Essays,  p.  54.  Longmans,  Green  &  Company. 

7  Painted  Windows,  p.  7.  Courtesy  of  G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons,  Publishers, 
New  York  and  London. 


80 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 

sorry  business  with  an  invincible  and  blessed 
hell. 

Rut,  as  William  James  pointed  out,  pessimism 
consists  in  a  religious  demand  to  which  there 
is  no  normal  religious  reply;  and  we  have  the 
religious  reply  to  this  demand  for  confidence, 
in  the  Christian  doctrine  of  redemption,  not 
simply  as  the  rescue  of  the  individual  but  as 
the  conservation  of  the  race.  No  one  can  find 
fault  with  the  latter-day  emphasis  on  Jesus  as 
the  prophet  of  the  social  conscience,  but  in 
addition  we  shall  have  to  recognize  the  inescap¬ 
able  truth  in  the  remark  of  Professor  Fitch,  in 
the  volume  already  quoted,  that  “what  has 
hastened  our  present  paganism  has  been  the 
removal  from  the  forefront  of  our  consciousness 
of  Jesus,  .  .  .  the  divine  Redeemer.’'8  The 
pulpit  will  have  to  answer  Bishop  McDowell’s 
anticipations  suggested  in  his  Yale  Lectures 
some  years  ago,  and  “put  the  edge  back  upon 
the  best  truth  we  have,  the  truth  of  redemp¬ 
tion.”  For  only  the  certain  conviction  that  the 
indestructible  worth  of  humanity  and  life  is 
determined  in  the  redeeming  victory  of  God 
will  meet  the  present  need  for  confidence  in 
moral  values  and  the  moral  destiny  of  men. 

Then,  finally,  there  is  to-day  a  widespread 
need  for  that  experience  of  inspiration,  strength. 


8  Fitch,  Preaching  and  Paganism,  p.  180f.  Yale  University  Press. 

81 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

and  continuing  hope,  which  we  gather  into  the 
word  “consolation” — a  need  which  is  disclosed 
most  dramatically  and  pathetically  as  well,  in 
the  world-wide  revival  of  all  forms  of  spiritual¬ 
ism,  from  commercialized  chicanery  to  pseudo¬ 
scientific  propaganda.  “We  had  needs  invent 
heaven,”  wrote  Robert  Louis  Stevenson,  “if 
it  had  not  been  revealed  to  us;  there  are  some 
things  that  fall  so  bitterly  ill  on  this  side 
time.”9  The  reason  men  and  women  crowd 
the  lectures  of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  and  Sir  A. 
Conan  Doyle  is  not  alone  because  they  are 
curious,  but  because  they  are  crushed;  not 
because  they  have  cracked  brains,  but  because 
they  have  broken  hearts.  Only  the  inscrutable 
disorders  of  personal  tragedy  can  account  for 
the  respect  given  the  current  descriptions  of 
the  spiritualists’  other  world — a  society  without 
moral  distinctions  or  moral  purpose;  continuity 
of  the  less  noble  aspects  of  consciousness, 
rather  than  immortality  of  personal  life; 
Homer’s  underworld  with  all  modern  conven¬ 
iences,  having,  according  to  these  most  emi¬ 
nent  authorities  in  the  science  of  applied  make- 
believe,  cigars,  tobacco,  brick  houses  and  dogs, 
but  no  God.  In  this  other  world  life  goes  on, 
so  these  propagandists  inform  us,  terribly 
like  life  in  this  world,  only  more  monotonous 

*  Stevenson,  Saint  Ives,  p.  149.  Charles  Scribner’s  Sons. 

82 


THE  RETURN  TO  THEOLOGY 


and  without  hope;  and  the  reason  men  and 
women  who,  we  think,  ought  to  know  better, 
are  captured  by  the  prospect  offered  them  is 
that  they  have  not  come  or  been  directed  to 
reasonable  assurance  of  anything  better.  As 
a  result  they  fail  to  see  the  essential  tragedy  in 
this  spiritualist  future  life,  namely,  not  that 
it  has  not  been  proved  to  exist,  but  that  if  it  does 
exist,  it  is  not  worth  having. 

There  is  no  necessity,  at  this  point,  of  saying 
more  than  that  the  answer  to  this  modern 
mood,  this  contemporary  social  and  personal 
need,  is  not  in  ever  so  sympathetic  exhorta¬ 
tions  or  sentimental  homilies  such  as  are  not 
uncommonly  indulged  above  our  dead.  The 
answer  which  will  adequately  meet  the  need 
and  the  demand  for  consolation  will  be  nothing 
less  complete  than  intelligent  exposition,  in  the 
light  of  modern  science — of  which,  it  is  to  be 
remarked,  Professor  Leuba  is  neither  the  most 
accurate  nor  authoritative  representative — of 
a  defensible  and  reasonable  Christian  doctrine 
of  immortality,  based  upon  the  character  of 
God  and  revealed  in  Christ  and  witnessed 
through  the  centuries  by  the  intuitions  and 
philosophy  of  the  noblest  and  wisest  minds. 

Christian  teaching,  it  may  be  remarked  in 
conclusion,  can  justify  its  right  to  be  exercised 
only  as  it  results  in  the  constant  and  effective 

83 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


invasion  of  life  with  the  truths  by  which  men 
live.  It  must  continually  reinterpret  and 
illumine  for  men  the  indispensable  doctrines 
of  the  Christian  faith  which,  however  easily 
they  may  be  professed,  are  not  truly  appre¬ 
ciated  except  as  “the  spoil  carried  off  from 
spiritual  struggles,  the  harvest  of  a  spiritual 
insight  at  once  bestowed  and  directed  by  the 
Spirit  of  God.”10 

Lidgett,  The  Spiritual  Principle  of  the  Atonement,  p.  71.  The  Meth¬ 
odist  BookConcern. 


) 


84 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 

In  the  chapter  on  4 ‘The  Rediscovery  of 
Religion”  the  contention  was  made  that  one 
of  the  fundamental  consequences  of  the  present 
day’s  dissatisfaction  with  organized  religious 
forms  would  be  the  reestablishment  of  the 
primacy  of  religious  experience.  In  the  chapter 
which  followed,  under  the  title  “The  Return 
to  Theology,”  the  discussion  urged  the  neces¬ 
sity  of  theological  interpretations  of  faith  and 
experience  as  the  answer  to  the  religious  needs 
both  of  individual  and  the  social  life.  It  has 
been  observed  also  as  the  witness  of  history 
that  the  great  religious  movements  have  begun 
in  new  or  renewed  personal  religious  experience, 
and  have  had  their  roots  at  the  same  time  in  new 
theological  apprehensions.  What,  then,  may 
be  forecast  as  the  kind  of  religious  awakening, 
the  direction  of  the  religious  thinking,  which 
seems  likely  to  follow  our  immediate  time? 

Dr.  John  A.  Hutton  has  an  answer  to  which 
we  may  well  give  consideration.  “I  sometimes 
think,”  he  has  written  in  his  Alexander  Robert¬ 
son  lectures,  “we  are  all  of  us  on  the  point  of 
making  the  discovery  that  our  Christianity  is 

85 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


true.”1  It  is  an  answer  in  fairly  sharp  contrast 
to  a  good  deal  of  the  writing  of  the  times,  from 
which  we  cannot  help  gathering  the  suspicion 
that  most  of  what  we  had  thought  was  our 
Christianity  is  about  to  be  exposed  as  false. 
One  does  not  need  to  confine  himself,  for  this 
inference,  to  the  opponents  of  Christianity, 
either  philosophical  or  practical,  who  view  the 
anticipated  debacle  of  religion  with  eagerness 
and  satisfaction;  it  is  discernible  in  the  utter¬ 
ances  of  some  earnest  and  sincere  men  and 
women  within  the  Christian  confession,  who 
are  turning  impatiently  from  the  Christianity 
of  tradition  and  development  and  are  urging 
upon  us  any  of  several  intellectual  and  social 
divergences  as  being  alone  in  harmony  with  the 
spirit  of  the  age. 

Like  the  rediscovery  of  religion,  this  is  by  no 
means  a  new  activity  of  the  human  spirit;  it 
is,  rather,  one  of  the  recurrent  habits  of  eager 
and  unsatisfied  minds.  Thomas  Wentworth 
Higginson,  describing  to  his  mother  the  Com¬ 
mencement  exercises  of  the  Cambridge  Divinity 
School,  in  1845,  wrote  that  “Elderly  ministers 
sniffed  at  radical  sentiments,  young  ones  smiled 
at  conservative  ditto,  and  Theodore  Parker 
sneered  ...  at  a  severe  criticism  on  Strauss.”2 

1  Hutton,  The  Proposal  of  Jesus,  p.  76.  George  H.  Doran  Company. 

2  Higginson,  The  Life  and  Letters  of  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson,  p.  4. 
Houghton  Mifflin  Company. 


86 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


It  reads  like  the  Commencement  exercises  of 
any  theological  school  to-day. 

For  undoubtedly  there  is  a  lure  in  what  we 
think  may  be  heresy.  The  spirit  of  curiosity 
and  independence  which  once  drove  men  to 
sail  strange  seas  and  dare  strange  lands  now 
finds  its  outlook  and  adventure  in  the  attempt 
on  strange  ideas.  It  was  once  the  vogue  to 
seek  a  new  route  to  India;  it  is  now  more  or 
less  the  fashion  to  seek  a  new  route  to  truth. 
Like  Keats’  watcher  of  the  skies,  our  generation 
seems  to  be  looking  for  new  notional  planets, 
or,  after  the  manner  of  the  Ancient  Mariner, 
would  be  the  first  to  burst  into  some  silent  sea 
of  novel  faith.  The  difficulty  about  the  bus¬ 
iness — not  always  recognized  at  once — is  that 
one  cannot  be  invariably  sure  that  what  he  has 
discovered  is  what  he  thinks  it  is.  One  of  the 
traditions  cherished  by  a  certain  theological 
seminary  class  is  of  an  occasion  when  a  bold 
student  disagreed  with  the  professor  of  syste¬ 
matic  theology  on  a  morning  when,  apparently, 
the  theological  temper  was  in  too  delicate  a 
balance.  The  student  prefaced  his  disagree¬ 
ment  with  the  professor’s  dictum  by  remark¬ 
ing,  “I  am  afraid,  sir,  that  I  am  a  heretic 
at  this  point,”  to  which  the  professor  replied 
with  no  little  acerbity,  “You  need  have  no  fear; 
you  are  not  a  heretic,  you  are  merely  a  fool.” 

87 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


It  is  due  to  the  memory  of  a  great  man  who 
was  a  gentleman  in  spite  of  temperamental 
defects,  that  immediately  he  proffered  his 
apology.  Nevertheless,  his  sharp  language  may 
be  recalled  to  warn  us  of  a  peril  too  little  appre¬ 
ciated  in  these  brave  days  of  exaggerated 
liberty  and  confidence;  for  one  of  the  disturbing 
elements  in  the  religious  confusion  of  the  present 
time  is  that  there  are  propagandists  announcing 
as  new  and  revolutionary  truths,  what  not 
infrequently  are  little  more  than  philosophical, 
political,  and  social  follies  formerly  abandoned 
in  the  careful  march  of  faith  and  life. 

Apart  from  this  more  easy  danger  of  mistak¬ 
ing  the  intellectual  debris  of  former  days  for 
unmined  deposits  of  future  wealth,  there  is  the 
more  constant  and  subtle  peril  of  a  mistaken 
attitude  toward  orthodoxy  itself.  Because 
certain  minds  within  the  church  have  refused 
to  learn  that  truth  is  a  unity,  and  so  have 
rejected  the  disclosures  of  science  and  the  lessons 
of  history;  because  certain  minds  within  the 
church  insist  upon  a  mechanical  theory  of 
biblical  inspiration,  an  indefensible  method 
and  an  undiscriminating  literalism  in  biblical 
interpretation;  and  with  the  noise  of  a  trumpet 
and  the  sound  of  many  words  seem  to  assume 
and  assert  that  they,  alone,  are  orthodox,  we 
are  in  danger,  in  our  revulsion  of  spirit,  of 

88 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


discarding  the  reality  which  they  so  stubbornly 
and  ignorantly  libel.  What  if  this  rigid  liter¬ 
alism  were,  itself,  the  most  fatal  heterodoxy? 

At  this  point,  however,  it  may  be  well  to 
inquire  as  to  the  permanent  values  of  a  great 
tradition,  and  of  the  heroisms  which  have  gone 
to  its  making,  and  their  worth  for  the  times 
that  follow.  One  of  our  ready  axioms  is  that 
the  heretics  of  to-day  are  the  prophets  of  to¬ 
morrow;  but  at  the  same  time  we  are  likely  to 
forget  that  to-day’s  conservatives  may  have 
been  yesterday’s  radicals.  Is  their  radicalism, 
so  dearly  bought  in  their  day  of  battle,  to  go 
for  nothing  now?  Must  spiritual  courage  be 
contemporaneous  in  order  to  have  meaning? 
If  the  history  of  the  progress  of  truth  would 
teach  us  that  the  new  views  men  repudiate  so 
violently  to-day  may  be  their  creed  to-morrow, 
it  also  asks  us  whether  we  can  welcome  the 
novelty  of  to-day  and  abandon  lightly  the 
innovation  which  saved  our  yesterday.  Is  a 
heretic’s  vision  worthless  after  it  has  been 
generally  accepted,  and  a  prophet  authentic 
only  in  the  hour  of  his  rejection?  Was  Christ 
less  credible  when  the  empire  of  Constantine 
acknowledged  him  than  he  was  when  the 
empire  of  Tiberius  crucified  him? 

There  is  no  lack  of  challenge  in  the  past,  for 
occasions  have  not  been  wanting  when,  while 

89 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


the  present  was  a  monotony  and  the  future 
offered  but  recurrent  tedium,  it  was  the  past 
which  contained  the  excitement  that  germi¬ 
nated  a  new  world.  To  the  men  of  the  fifteenth 
century,  as  some  one  has  remarked,  the  classics 
were  the  only  possible  vehicle  of  that  spirit 
which,  from  time  to  time,  rediscovers  that  the 
True  and  the  Beautiful  are  living  values;  and 
to  be  a  classical  scholar  at  that  time  was  to  be, 
not  a  conservative  but  a  revolutionary.  So  an 
old  highway  not  infrequently  becomes  a  new 
road,  and  an  abandoned  path  presents  adven¬ 
ture  on  every  hand. 

When  we  remember,  moreover,  that  it  is 
not  simply  our  minds  but  our  lives  that  depend 
upon  what  we  believe,  is  it  not  as  thrilling  to 
risk  them  upon  “the  moral  judgment  of  the 
dead”  as  upon  the  confident  presumptions  of 
the  living?  Bearing  in  mind  the  pre-Ptolemaic 
theory  of  the  universe  amid  which  orthodox 
Christianity  arose,  the  centuries  without  science 
and  without  democracy  through  which  it  has 
come,  the  savageries  which  have  been  committed 
in  its  name,  the  tyrannies  which  have  been 
identified  with  it,  the  wars  which  it  has  inspired, 
the  vested  wrongs  which  it  has  protected,  is 
there  not  as  much  danger,  is  there  not  as  much 
excitement,  is  there  not  as  great  a  demand  for 
courage,  in  building  one’s  life  upon  it  now,  as  in 

90 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


following  the  most  clamorous  and  progressive 
doctrine  of  the  present  day?  “The  gospel/’ 
wrote  Silvester  Horne,  “is  more  than  a  great 
faith;  it  is  a  great  adventure/’3  In  these  days 
of  turbulence  of  mind  and  trial  of  spirit;  amid 
these  contemporary  moods  that  reject  disci¬ 
pline  and  abuse  liberty  and  already  threaten  to 
change  democracy  from  an  exercise  of  obligation 
into  the  indulgence  of  irresponsible  crowd 
passions,  it  is  to  be  contended  that,  for  the 
religious  mind  and  life,  the  historic  Christian 
tradition  speaks,  not  the  dullness  of  an  exhausted 
interest,  but  the  appeal  of  a  difficult  and 
perilous  adventure. 


I 

When,  now,  we  speak  with  any  degree  of 
friendliness  of  this  word  “orthodoxy,”  we  have 
to  be  as  wise  as  serpents  in  order  to  convince  a 
good  many  people  that  we  are  not  as  harmless 
as  doves,  for  to  such  people  orthodoxy  means 
nothing  more  modern  or  congenial  than  what 
was  believed  by  queer-minded  Christians  not 
later  than  fifteen  hundred  years  ago.  Not  a 
few  men  and  women  of  what  is  called  the 
modern  spirit  apparently  are  of  the  opinion 
that  orthodox  Christianity  comprises  nothing 
outside  of  the  fourth-century  creeds,  though 


*  Horne,  The  Romance  of  Preaching,  p.  193.  Fleming  H.  Revell  Company. 

91 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


there  are  some  more  enlightened  souls  who  go 
so  far  as  to  include  the  Thirty-nine  Articles  of 
the  Anglican  Church,  or,  if  they  are  Methodist, 
the  Twenty-five  which  John  Wesley  considered 
sufficient  for  the  guidance  of  his  American 
societies.  The  truth  may  be  stated  in  this 
fashion:  that  the  historic  creeds  are  orthodox, 
but  they  are  not  orthodoxy;  because  of  which 
there  are,  very  roughly  discriminated,  two 
views  of  them,  equally  mistaken,  and  perhaps 
equally  unfortunate  in  their  effect  upon  our 
actual  religious  thought  and  life. 

The  first  view  is  that  the  historic  creeds,  the 
Apostles’,  the  Nicene,  the  Confessions  of 
Augsburg  and  of  Westminster,  the  Articles  of 
Religion,  and  the  like,  are  timeless  and  unchang¬ 
ing  in  their  values  and  imperatives,  to  be  held 

“ . as  an  infant’s  hand 

Holds  purposeless  whatso  is  placed  therein.” 

When  Andover  Seminary  was  founded,  for 
example,  in  1807,  those  fine  Congregational 
leaders  who  established  it  introduced  their 
enterprise  with  a  creed  which,  they  wrote, 
should  be  “as  permanent  as  the  sun  and  stars 
forever.”  But  that  creed,  instead  of  lasting 
forever,  as  a  professor  in  that  seminary  has 
reminded  us,  was  a  dead  letter  within  about 
seventy-five  years.  Such  a  conception  of  the 
creeds  is  but  one  step  worse  than  that  of  the 

92 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


verbal  inspiration  of  the  Scriptures  and  the 
mathematical  interpretation  of  Daniel  and  the 
Apocalypse,  according  to  which  men  and  women 
in  every  age  have  been  sure  that  the  end  of  the 
world  was  immediately  at  hand.  Whatever 
the  historic  creeds  have  been  or  now  are,  they 
are  not  the  last  word  in  the  language  of  a 
living  faith. 

Beside  this  mistaken  view  is  another  as  far  in 
error,  though  in  the  opposite  direction.  It  is 
the  view  which  relegates  the  creeds  to  a  purely 
temporary  and  now  outgrown  usefulness,  and 
bids  us  who  live  in  a  day  so  much  later  and  so 
different  from  theirs,  consider  them  as  curious 
inheritances  from  a  vanished  era,  like  fossils 
in  the  rocks  or  the  colonnades  of  Palmyra. 
Perhaps  those  comparisons  are  too  dignified, 
for  was  it  not  Henry  Ward  Beecher  who  said 
that  creeds  are  like  birds’  nests;  they  give  a 
place  to  rest,  but,  like  birds’  nests,  should  be 
pulled  down  and  built  new  every  year?  The 
answer  to  that  epigram  is  easy  and  immediate: 
creeds  which  are  as  temporary  as  birds’  nests 
will  present  results  as  impermanent  as  birds. 
It  was  no  birds’-nest  creed  that  produced  Saint 
Peters,  or  the  Puritan  commonwealth,  or  the 
Letter  to  the  Romans. 

Which  is  not  to  say  that  the  historic  creeds 
had  not  a  value  and  meaning  peculiar  to  their 

93 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

own  times,  a  value  and  meaning  which  they 
have  not  had  since.  In  fact,  even  the  most 
creedless-minded  critic  would  be  guilty  of  less 
irrelevant  and  loose  reflection  on  the  fourth- 
century  formulas  if  he  should  come  to  an  under¬ 
standing  of  the  service  which  those  formulas 
rendered  the  fourth-century  life.  By  the  time 
of  that  century  the  once-compelling  principles 
of  authority  one  by  one  had  broken  down. 
There  had  been  the  principle  upon  which  Greek 
and  Latin  civilization  had  been  erected,  of 
hereditary  monarchy;  that  had  gone.  There 
had  been  the  republican  principle  of  authority 
as  expressed  through  the  Roman  Senate;  that 
had  crumbled.  There  had  been  the  Asiatic 
principle  of  authority  incarnate  in  a  deified 
emperor;  that  had  failed  in  the  East  and  had 
proven  impossible  in  the  West.  Meanwhile 
the  age  and  the  empire  were  swept  with  wars 
and  revolutions.  The  ancient  class  distinc¬ 
tions,  which  had  given  stability  to  an  earlier 
society,  had  melted,  and  the  Barbarians  were 
pouring  in.  The  old  traditions,  the  protecting 
laws,  the  bewildered  government,  and  the 
private  interests  of  men,  were  all  alike  preca¬ 
rious  and  impotent.  It  was  in  such  an  age, 
at  Nicea,  that  human  thought  once  more 
grew  firm  and  fixed  in  the  doctrine  of  God. 
Out  of  the  theological  subtleties  at  which  Car- 

94 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


lyle  railed  with  more  noise  than  knowledge 
there  issued,  as  a  no  less  authoritative  student 
than  the  historian  Ferrero  has  suggested,  the 
unity  and  stability  of  the  fundamental  doc¬ 
trines  of  Christianity,  which  unity  and  sta¬ 
bility  were  “the  last  foundation  of  order  in  the 
world  which,  because  of  the  impossibility  of 
finding  a  sure  and  certain  principle  of  authority, 
was  falling  into  disintegration.”4  It  is  to  be 
remarked,  in  passing,  that  a  comparison  of  that 
age  and  our  own  will  disclose  startling  similari¬ 
ties  of  tendency  and  spirit,  and  will  suggest 
that  the  spiritual  and  social  confusion  amid 
which  the  church  and  society  find  themselves 
to-day  so  helpless  may  be  not  unconnected 
with  the  practical  repudiation  of  creedal  values 
and  loyalty  which  has  marked  the  generation 
to  which  we  belong. 

But  having  said  this  much  about  the  creeds, 
it  is  not  meant  by  orthodoxy  and  our  adventure 
on  it  that  an  attempt  is  to  be  made  to  force 
our  present-day  religious  experience  and  con¬ 
viction  to  express  themselves  in  those  ancient 
phraseologies.  We  could  never  do  that,  for 
the  simple  reason  that  we  cannot  think  in  the 
same  circumstances  of  philosophical  contro¬ 
versy,  classical  tradition,  and  scientific  imma- 

*  Ferrero,  The  Ruin  of  Ancient  Civilization  and  the  Triumph  of  Christian¬ 
ity,  p.  166.  Courtesy  of  G.  P.  Putnam’s  Sons,  Publishers,  New  York  and 
London. 


95 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

turity ,  in  which  those  earlier  Christians  thought ; 
the  circumstances,  in  other  words,  in  which  the 
creeds  were  formulated.  Nor  are  we  yet  pre¬ 
pared  to  write  the  consensus  of  present-day 
religious  experience  and  conviction  in  any 
similar  succinct  and  formal  statement  of  faith; 
because,  in  our  day  of  philosophical  liberality, 
of  revolt  from  tradition,  and  of  enormous 
scientific  advance,  we  cannot  immediately 
think,  as  they  thought  religiously,  in  terms  of 
adequate  precision  and  grasp.  To  the  making 
of  those  great  formulas  had  gone  at  least  three 
centuries  of  uninterrupted  intellectual  concen¬ 
tration  upon  the  Christian  doctrines  as  they 
were  being  tested  against  pagan  philosophy 
and  the  conduct  of  a  difficult  personal  and 
social  life.  But  we  have  largely  lost  the  genius, 
because  we  have  turned  aside  from  the  practice, 
of  thoroughgoing  and  comprehensive  religious 
thinking.  For  two  generations  at  least  we 
have  been  concentrating  our  thought  upon  the 
disclosures  of  science,  upon  the  application  of 
machinery  to  material  production,  and  upon 
the  implications  and  developments  of  democ¬ 
racy.  Religion,  until  very  recently,  has  been 
taken  for  granted,  but  not  explored;  or,  at  most, 
lived  with  personal  fidelity  but  not  intelligently 
searched  for  its  sequences  of  profound  and 
expanding  truth.  I  do  not  forget  our  gener- 

96 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


ation’s  activities  in  the  realms  of  historical 
criticism  and  psychology,  as  these  have  dealt 
with  the  documents,  the  institutions,  and  the 
phenomena  of  religion;  but  all  of  these  have 
been  investigations  of  natural  causes  rather 
than  appraisals  of  spiritual  reality  and  discrim¬ 
ination.  They  have  made  us  familiar  with  the 
natural;  they  have  not  made  us  intellectually 
at  home  with  the  supernatural,  so  that  we  can 
find  no  better  invitation  to  the  adventure  of 
orthodoxy  than  that  in  the  words  of  Ignatius: 
“Let  us  learn  to  think  according  to  Christianity.” 

In  short,  we  are  back,  if  not  at  the  beginning, 
at  least  at  the  decisive  point  in  our  adventure, 
at  the  simple,  exact  meaning  of  the  word 
“orthodoxy”  itself,  namely,  right  teaching; 
which  involves,  first  of  all,  right  thinking;  and 
right  thinking  may  be  vastly  different  from  yet 
every  bit  as  dramatic  as  that  new  thinking 
which  seems  so  much  more  congenial  to  the 
mood  of  to-day.  John  Bright,  being  reproached 
one  day  for  having  voted,  in  Parliament, 
against  so  great  a  thinker  as  John  Stuart  Mill, 
replied:  “The  worst  of  great  thinkers  is  that 
they  generally  think  wrong.”  It  is  an  obser¬ 
vation  perhaps  more  epigrammatic  than  cor¬ 
rect;  but  the  social,  political,  and  religious 
disorder  of  our  present  day  makes  it  impossible 
to  doubt  that,  however  great  may  be  some  of 

97 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


the  so-called  thinking-for-the-times  of  which 
we  have  had  much  assurance,  frequently  it 
has  been  wrong  thinking.  Let  us  come  back 
with  Ignatius  and  think  according  to  Chris¬ 
tianity;  let  us  set  ourselves  to  think  right. 

II 

What  is  the  test  of  right  thinking,  what 
is  the  source  of  orthodoxy?  The  most 
daring  and  monumental  answer  has  been 
that  of  the  Nicene  Creed  itself.  Whatever 
were  the  developments  in  Christian  thought 
from  Pentecost  to  the  generation  which  saw 
the  Council  of  Nicea,  it  will  not  be  untrue  to 
say  that  the  Christians  of  those  intervening 
centuries  discovered  orthodoxy  in  their  Chris¬ 
tian  documents;  in  the  writings  of  evangelists, 
the  letters  of  apostles,  the  epistles  and  admo¬ 
nitions  of  presbyter  and  bishop.  It  was  inev¬ 
itable  that,  in  some  form,  soon  or  late,  the 
question  should  arise,  Can  there  be  so  many 
repositories  of  right  thinking,  can  there  be 
so  large  and  varied  a  literature  of  spiritual 
authority?  The  church  replied  with  the  fixed 
canon  of  the  Scriptures  and  the  formulated 
creed,  and  planted  the  seeds  of  that  interminable 
discussion  which  has  been  vocal,  in  many  a 
century  since,  over  the  seat  of  religious 
authority.  We  are  passingly  familiar  with  the 

98 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


outstanding  episodes  of  that  debate,  asserting 
here  that  authority  is  in  the  church  expressing 
itself  through  councils,  declaring  there  that  it 
is  in  the  canonical  Scriptures,  and  again  pro¬ 
testing  that  it  is  the  individual  conscience  to 
which  the  Scriptures  have  made  their  direct 
and  effective  appeal.  The  Scriptures,  however, 
lost  their  automatic,  semimagical  influence 
when  men  realized  how  truly  they  are  the 
product  of  human  life,  created  by  the  church, 
and  speaking  to  the  experience  of  men  because 
they  are  the  record  of  other  men’s  experiences. 
The  church  perhaps  would  have  kept  its  place 
as  authoritative  had  its  decisions  really  been 
the  decisions  of  the  whole  church.  Rut  it  also 
failed  as  more  and  more  they  came  to  be  the 
conclusions  of  a  very  small  minority  of  the 
entire  church,  and  of  a  minority  which,  though 
specialized  in  intellectual  interests,  was  also 
narrowed  and  isolated  in  living  experience. 
What  really  spoke  through  the  Scriptures  and 
through  the  church  was  life  itself.  A  church 
council,  it  is  true,  formally  determined  what 
books  should  be  contained  in  the  Scriptures 
confirmed  as  the  inspired  Word  of  God;  and 
from  one  point  of  view  one  could  say  with 
Dean  Inge  that  such  a  decision  was  no  more 
than  a  majority  vote  at  a  meeting.  Rut  that 
is  not  the  whole  truth.  The  majority  vote  at 

99 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


the  meeting  was  making  no  new  decision;  it 
was  registering  the  decision  which  the  multi¬ 
tudinous  experience  of  generations  of  Christians 
had  already  reached,  as  a  result  of  their  actual 
contact  with  these  various  books.  The  majority 
vote  in  the  meeting  recorded  the  conclusion  of 
two  hundred  seventy-five  years  of  Christian 
experience,  that,  in  the  illuminating  remark  of 
Bishop  Edwin  II.  Hughes,  “A  book  that  is  not 
inspiring  cannot  be  proved  to  be  inspired.”5 

It  is  from  the  complementary  angle,  and  is 
more  to  the  point  now,  because  it  contradicts 
a  good  deal  of  present-day  opinion,  to  say  that 
the  individual  conscience  and  enlightenment, 
the  individual  experience  itself,  cannot  be  the 
final  test  of  right  thinking,  for  they  do  not 
represent  the  conclusions  of  life  but  only  the 
inferences  of  a  very  insignificant  portion  of 
life.  This  is  an  age  of  exaggerated  individualism 
in  which  the  obligation  of  the  individual  to  be 
himself  is  very  fiercely  preached;  but,  as  the 
late  Principal  Forsyth  has  said,  there  are  so 
many  people  who  want  to  be  themselves  more 
than  to  be  right.  We  have  to  face  the  uncom¬ 
fortable  but  inexorable  fact  that  individualism 
in  religious  thinking  is  always  suspect,  and  has 
generally  been  wrong,  even  when  it  displays 
the  mechanical  accuracies  of  logic  and  is  sup- 


6  Hughes,  The  Bible  and  Life,  p.  25.  The  Methodist  Book  Concern. 

100 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


ported  by  unimpeachable  conduct  of  personal 
life.  The  test  of  right  thinking,  the  source  of 
orthodoxy,  is  life  in  the  large.  You  appraise 
a  personal  conviction,  not  by  its  effect  upon 
the  person  holding  the  conviction,  but  by  what 
the  effect  would  be  if  all  individuals  held  it. 
An  atheist  may  be  a  patriot,  and  defend  his 
atheism  by  urging  his  good  citizenship;  but  an 
atheist  is  a  good  citizen  because  the  over¬ 
whelming  majority  of  citizens  believe  in  God. 
A  few  men  and  women  may  indulge  the 
emotional  extravagance  of  “The  Holy  Ghost 
and  Us”  society,  and  the  community  maintain 
itself  in  dignity  and  reverence;  but  if  all  our 
neighbors  were  Holy  Rollers,  what  would  our 
neighborhood  become?  Calvinism  has  produced 
more  than  one  of  Mrs.  Deland’s  John  Ward, 
Preacher;  but  if  any  considerable  number  of 
its  preachers  at  one  time  had  been  John  Wards, 
Calvinism  itself  would  have  gone  to  wreck. 
Neither  personal  experience  nor  individual 
knowledge  is  absolute;  they  are  always  relative; 
and  there  is  no  word  our  present-day  individ¬ 
ualists  in  religion  need  more  to  heed  than  that 
exhortation  which  Oliver  Cromwell  once 
addressed  to  the  Scotch:  “I  beseech  you,  in 
the  tender  mercies  of  the  Lord,  believe  it 
possible  that  you  may  be  mistaken.” 

Earlier  in  the  chapter  it  was  intimated  that 

101 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


the  adventure  of  orthodoxy  would  be  difficult 
and  perilous.  We  can  begin  here  to  glimpse 
something  of  the  difficulty  and  feel,  perhaps,  the 
approach  of  its  peril.  We  must  think  according 
to  Christianity;  and  wherever  we  may  find 
the  materials  for  thought,  we  cannot  discover 
orthodoxy  itself,  clear  cut  and  unmistakable, 
in  a  book,  however  sacred;  we  cannot  localize 
it  in  the  formula  of  a  church,  however  positive 
and  even  pertinent  it  may  seem  to  be;  we  can¬ 
not  apprehend  it  in  the  witness  of  conscience 
and  our  personal  experience  alone,  however 
satisfying  to  us  as  individuals  that  witness  may 
appear.  Yet  we  have  to  discover  it  in  experi¬ 
ence  and  test  it  by  some  durable  and  definitive 
reality,  historical  as  well  as  experimental,  a 
standard  without  and  a  light  within. 

Ill 

This  seems  now  to  forecast  a  vague  if  not  a 
lame  conclusion.  It  seems  to  promise  no  early, 
or  even  certain.  City  of  Faith,  bulwarked  behind 
precise  and  guarded  formulas,  in  which,  to  mix 
the  figure,  we  can  say  to  our  soul,  “Take  thine 
ease.”  We  are  pilgrims  and  sojourners  in  this, 
as  in  the  other  quests  of  life;  and  we  seek  a  city, 
we  do  not  possess  one.  The  bulwarked 
structures  of  fixed  and  settled  faith  which  men 
have  built  in  the  past,  and  in  which  they 

102 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


thought  to  dwell  securely,  have,  one  by  one, 
proved  to  be  little  more  than  lodgings  for  a 
night,  left  far  behind  in  the  unceasing  march 
of  inquiry  and  experience.  Though  Stevenson’s 
observation  that  to  travel  hopefully  is  better 
than  to  have  arrived,  may  conceivably  be 
subject  to  revision  as  a  final  philosophy,  it 
cannot  be  denied  that  it  reflects  the  experiences 
of  life.  Thinking  according  to  Christianity 
is  to  think  right,  not  to  come  to  the  end  of 
thought. 

But  vague  as  the  conclusion  may  threaten 
to  be,  there  are  several  considerations  which 
will  suggest  a  saving  and  productive  definiteness. 
First,  Christian  orthodoxy  will  not  attempt  to 
explain  or  answer  the  needs  of  our  present  day 
as  if  our  day  itself  stood  isolated  and  alone,  nor 
to  meet  its  problems  considered  wholly  by 
themselves.  A  day  or  an  age  is  but  an  incident  in 
the  procession  of  humanity,  and  we  have  to  look 
before  and  after  if  we  would  see  life,  or  even  our 
own  time,  whole.  During  the  epidemic  of  1918, 
among  the  expedients  inaugurated  for  the 
protection  of  the  population  by  the  Board  of 
Health  of  a  certain  American  city,  was  an 
order  that  at  the  public  services  of  the  churches 
only  alternate  rows  of  pews  should  be  occupied. 
As  a  result,  every  other  row  of  pews  was  packed 
with  worshipers,  while  the  rows  between 

103 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

displayed  their  aching  emptiness  in  the  interest 
of  the  public  health.  But  the  order  was 
rescinded  after  the  first  Sunday  of  its  execution, 
when  the  pulpit  observation  of  one  of  the  minis¬ 
ters  was  reported,  to  the  effect  that  the  Board 
of  Health  evidently  believed  that  the  germs 
could  not  jump  sideways.  It  is  even  a  more 
ludicrous  state  of  mind  to  conceive  that  living 
truth  has,  so  to  speak,  only  lateral  relationships; 
and  that  one  can  deal  intelligently  with  con¬ 
temporary  interests  while  ignoring  alike  the 
witness  of  the  past  and  the  admonitions  of  the 
future.  The  adventure  of  a  vital  orthodoxy 
will  be  an  approach,  not  alone  to  the  spirit  of 
the  age,  but,  recalling  Dean  Inge’s  fine  contrast, 
to  the  Spirit  of  the  Ages,  a  much  more  difficult 
and  productive  enterprise.  It  will  be  an  explo¬ 
ration,  not  of  the  conveniences  of  a  generation, 
but  of  the  continuities  of  life.  Mr.  Glen 
Frank,  in  an  address  delivered  in  the  spring  of 
1922,  uttered  his  belief  “that  a  vast  fresh 
advance  of  the  human  soul  is  about  to  be  made, 
a  world-wide  dream  of  a  vast  moral  renewal 
is  simmering  beneath  the  confusion  and  ill  of 
our  time.  That  is,”  he  went  on  to  say,  “the 
raw  materials  for  such  a  Renaissance  are  lying 
all  about  us  throughout  Western  Civilization.” 
Doubtless  one  may  be  uncertain  as  to  how  a 
dream  simmers,  but  few  of  us  will  deny  that 

104 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


the  dream  is  there;  and  none  can  long  disbelieve 
that  the  materials  for  such  a  Renaissance  as 
Mr.  Frank  predicts  are  lying  all  about  us. 
However,  our  fresh  advance  will  not  be  an 
explosion;  it  will  be  a  growth.  It  will  not 
isolate  the  materials  of  to-day  from  all  other 
days;  it  will  fuse  them  with  the  stuff  of  all  our 
yesterdays,  and  our  advance  of  soul  will  be  a 
development  and  not  a  departure.  The  New 
Testament  itself  shows  changes,  as  Doctor 
Moffatt  has  remarked,  but  “they  are  the 
changes  of  a  movement  which  preserves  its 
identity.”6 

On  the  other  hand,  Christian  orthodoxy  will 
not  reject  the  contributions  of  the  most  modern 
experience  and  insight;  and  that  the  present 
age  has  its  particular  contribution  to  make  to 
the  substance  of  religious  thinking  and  to  the 
manner  of  its  expression  ought  to  be  too  obvious 
even  to  need  mention.  An  age  which  has 
discovered  the  empty  spaces  to  be  filled  with 
laboring  energies  lifting  to  the  winds  its  winged 
ships,  which  has  found  the  silent  atmospheres 
to  be  a  riot  of  melody  and  rhythm,  which  has 
explored  a  universe  of  ceaseless  forces  whirling 
in  the  atom  of  an  atom,  which  has  appraised 
the  coordinated  mysteries  of  mind  and  feeling. 


«  Moffatt,  The  Approach  to  the  New  Testament,  p.  28.  George  H.  Doran 
Company. 

105 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

and  now  surveys  a  reckonable  world  within  the 
enigma  of  personality;  an  age  which  dares  the 
last  experiment  in  human  freedom,  and  risks 
its  civilization  on  the  instincts  of  the  unen¬ 
lightened  man — such  an  age  has  wealth  of  new 
knowledge  with  which  to  enrich  the  most 
opulent  tradition,  and  wealth  of  experience 
with  which  to  challenge  the  most  confident. 
Passing  events,  it  has  been  very  wisely  said, 
are  only  important  in  so  far  as  they  are  not 
passing;  and  what  age  has  had  more  numerous 
or  greater  factors  of  permanence  in  its  charac¬ 
teristic  events  than  ours?  Underneath  the 
flow  of  changing  modern  moods  and  passions, 
underneath  the  expediencies  of  an  order  whose 
imperfections  doom  themselves  to  evanescence, 
are  enduring  realities  of  knowledge,  experience, 
and  ideal.  Behind  the  transitory  ebullitions  of 
the  spirit  of  our  age,  the  Spirit  of  the  Ages 
maintains  unstayed  its  solemn  process,  as 
beneath  the  burgeonings  of  spring  which  fade 
and  fall  persists  the  growing  permanence  of  the 
tree.  Modern  science  must  modify  our  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  supernatural;  modern  psychology 
must  bring  new  light  to  our  understanding  of 
religious  experience;  modern  democracy  must 
appropriately  change  our  ideas  of  God.  But 
too  commonly  we  have  cherished  the  feeling, 
sometimes  have  made  it  a  measurable  boast, 

106 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


that  in  accomplishing  these  alterations  of 
belief  and  attitude  we  have  cut  ourselves  off 
from  an  outworn  past;  a  past  in  which  ortho¬ 
doxy,  like  a  prison,  still  incarcerates  the  primitive 
minded,  while  the  freedoms  of  the  spirit,  the 
amplitudes  of  the  inquiring  intelligence,  the 
quickening  winds  of  productive  curiosity,  belong 
wholly  to  our  isolated  area  of  thinking  which, 
we  compliment  ourselves,  is  revolt  and  heresy. 
To  the  contrary,  living  orthodoxy  rejects  none 
of  these  gifts  of  faith  or  experience  or  oppor¬ 
tunity  which  the  latest  hour  may  bring.  It 
simply  appraises  every  gift  in  respect  of  its 
value,  not  alone  in  itself,  but  also  in  relation 
to  the  vast  and  ordered  continuity  of  truth  as 
it  has  been  tested  and  effective  through  the 
corporate  experience  of  all  Christian  men. 

It  is  this  which  makes  what  has  been  called 
the  romance  of  orthodoxy;  a  romance  which 
Gilbert  Chesterton  has  suggested  in  a  paragraph 
describing  how  the  church,  as  he  says,  “left  on 
the  one  hand  the  huge  bulk  of  Arianism, 
buttressed  by  all  the  worldly  powers  to  make 
Christianity  too  worldly.  The  next  instant 
she  was  swerving  to  avoid  an  Orientialism 
which  would  have  made  it  too  unworldly.”7 
That  devious  and  daring  course  of  orthodoxy 
can  be  observed  throughout  the  entire  history 

7  Chesterton,  Orthodoxy ,  p.  186.  Dodd,  Mead  &  Company. 

107 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


of  the  church.  The  seventeenth  century,  for 
example,  saw  the  pride,  the  power,  the  success 
of  Calvinism,  and  in  the  light  of  the  service 
which  Calvinism  was  rendering,  it  would  have 
been  comparatively  easy  for  the  whole  church 
to  have  surrendered  to  it,  and,  ultimately,  to 
have  lost  the  gospel  of  hope  in  a  predestinarian 
pessimism  worse  than  pagan  fate.  It  would 
have  been  comparatively  easy,  in  the  light  of 
desolated  and  desolating  social  conditions,  for 
the  church  to  have  surrendered,  at  one  time  or 
another,  to  the  hysterias  of  premillennialism, 
with  its  superficial  loyalty  to  Christ  and  its 
fundamental  and  comfortable  selfishness.  To 
have  fallen  into  any  one  of  these  spiritual 
obsessions,  to  quote  Chesterton  again,  “from 
gnosticism  to  Christian  Science,  would  indeed 
have  been  obvious  and  tame.  But  to  have 
avoided  them  all  has  been  one  whirling 
adventure.”8 

So  we  reach  one  more  inquiry:  Have  we, 
then,  no  fixed  and  certain  terminus  a  quo;  and 
have  we  no  durable  equipment  of  the  mind  by 
which,  as  by  a  compass,  to  guide  our  adventure? 
The  question,  thus  phrased,  is  awkward,  but 
the  answer  is  immediate  and  sure;  we  have 
both  the  terminus  a  quo  and  the  durable  equip¬ 
ment  of  the  mind,  namely,  those  data  of  the 


8  Op.  cit.,  p.  186f. 


108 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 

supernatural  which  lie  at  the  heart  of  the  gospel, 
which  Christian  life  as  well  as  Christian  theology 
has  always  acknowledged  as  the  foundation  of 
its  complex  and  variegated  structure.  “If 
religion  is  to  change  us,  we  must  be  overcome 
by  facts  which  we  cannot  help  believing  and 
the  realization  of  which  alters  everything.”9 
On  the  least  possible  reckoning  these  are  the 
facts  with  which  we  have  to  do:  the  self-con¬ 
sciousness  of  Jesus,  the  redemptive  meaning 
of  his  death,  the  consummating  mystery  of  his 
resurrection.  These  are  the  facts  on  which, 
from  the  first,  Christianity  has  stood.  They 
may  be  inexplicable  but  they  are  inescapable. 
They  may  be  contradictory,  but  they  are 
inevitable.  You  cannot  get  rid  of  them  and 
retain  Christianity.  It  is  admitted  that  with 
them  it  is  difficult  to  explain  the  world  to-day 
or  the  position  of  Christianity  in  it;  but  without 
them  it  is  impossible  to  explain  Christianity  at 
all. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  much  sincere  modem 
thinking  fails;  it  does  not  realize  the  inexor¬ 
ableness  of  these  facts,  not  simply  for  the  past, 
but  for  the  present  as  well,  Mr.  Glen  Frank, 
to  cite  again  the  address  to  which  reference  was 
made  on  a  preceding  page,  said  that  the  church 

*  Mackintosh,  The  Divine  Initiative,  p.  48.  Student  Christian  Move¬ 
ment  of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland. 

109 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

cannot  furnish  the  leadership  for  the  spiritual 
renaissance  which  he  feels  is  at  hand,  until  it 
shall  “have  the  courage  to  substitute  the 
‘religion  of  Jesus’  for  ‘Christianity.’  ”  If  he 
means  by  “Christianity”  those  stereotyped 
forms  of  organization,  the  divisive  formulas 
which  have  produced  sects,  the  narrowing  and 
exclusive  nonessentials  which  have  too  greatly 
occupied  the  religious  enterprise,  his  remark 
may  be  true.  But  thoughtful  men  do  not 
usually  conceive  of  Christianity  in  that  way. 
If  he  means  by  “the  religion  of  Jesus”  the 
transforming  conception  of  God  and  life  which 
flows  from  the  historic  faith  that  Jesus  is  the 
incarnation  of  God,  his  remark  may  be  true. 
But  the  phrase  is  not  usually  employed  to 
express  that  conception.  In  its  customary 
significance,  “the  religion  of  Jesus”  would  be 
possible  only  to  those  who  have  the  experience 
and  consciousness  of  Jesus.  The  religion  of 
Jesus  would  be  possible  only  to  those  who 
cannot  be  convicted  of  sin,  who  can  declare 
that  themselves  and  the  Father  are  one,  who 
can  say  that  to  have  seen  them  is  to  have  seen 
God.  Jesus,  for  instance,  needed  no  Redeemer 
because  he  had  nothing  from  which  to  be 
redeemed;  but  men  and  women  who  know  the 
malignance  of  their  own  transgressions  fix  their 
hope  on  One  who  was  bruised  for  their  iniquities. 

110 


THE  ADVENTURE  OF  ORTHODOXY 


J esus,  moreover,  claimed  the  cross  as  an  integral 
part  of  his  duty,  and  those  closest  to  him  both 
in  time  and  thought  declared  it  to  be  their 
own  deliverance.  The  Son  of  man,  he  said, 
came  not  to  live  his  life,  but  to  lose  it,  not  to 
give  his  career  as  an  example,  but  to  give  him¬ 
self  as  a  ransom.  The  testimony  of  the  New 
Testament,  studied  in  perspective,  is  that  the 
religion  which  Jesus  had  would  do  for  him,  but 
only  the  religion  which  he  is  will  do  for  any  one 
else.  In  order  to  substitute  the  religion  of 
Jesus  for  Christianity,  if  the  phrases  are  to  be 
taken  in  their  usual  meaning,  Mr.  Frank  will 
first  have  to  discredit  the  witness  of  Jesus 
himself  and  deny  the  experience  and  confession 
of  those  who  were  closest  to  him.  In  other 
words,  he  will  reconstruct  Christianity  by 
rejecting  its  facts. 

As  has  already  been  remarked,  these  data 
of  the  supernatural  on  which  Christianity  from 
the  first  has  stood,  are  inexplicable  and  may  be 
construed  as  contradictory.  They  are  an  order 
of  paradox  rather  than  of  agreement,  and 
inveigle  the  reason  rather  than  satisfy  it. 
Because  of  that  fact  the  historic  creeds,  which 
we  had  thought  we  had  left  far  behind  us,  are 
still  our  living,  if  not  mentally  congenial, 
contemporaries,  for  they  are  the  most  impreg¬ 
nable  and  majestic  correlations  of  those  para- 

111 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


doxes  which  have  yet  been  made.  We  cannot 
take  them  as  the  completed  expression  of  total 
Christian  experience  or  faith;  we  shall  doubtless 
come  some  time  to  more  modern  and  friendly 
formulas;  we  may  very  likely  reach  Professor 
Ellwood’s  ideal  of  a  more  rational,  revitalized, 
and  socialized  Christianity,  but  we  shall  never 
come  to  any  simpler  creed,  for  we  cannot  make 
a  simpler  creed  which  will  contain  all  the  facts.10 

10  Compare  Figgis,  Civilization  at  the  Cross  Roads,  p.  195. 


/ 


112 


CHAPTER  V 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 

In  the  preceding  chapter  it  has  been  said  that 
there  are  certain  data  of  the  supernatural 
which  are  at  once  the  heart  of  Christian  faith 
and  the  foundation  of  Christian  theology  and 
life,  namely,  the  self-consciousness  of  Jesus, 
the  redemptive  meaning  and  value  of  his  death, 
and  the  consummating  mystery  of  his  resur¬ 
rection.  It  was  said  further  that  while  these 
data  of  the  supernatural  may  be  contradictory, 
they  are  inescapable;  you  cannot  get  rid  of 
them  and  still  have  Christianity.  The  con¬ 
clusion  was  drawn,  accordingly,  that  while  it 
is  not  improbable  that  we  shall  come,  soon  or 
late,  to  new  statements  of  Christian  belief,  new 
phraseologies  of  our  creeds,  we  can  never  come 
to  any  creed  simpler  than  these  which  we  now 
possess,  because  no  simpler  creed  would  include 
all  the  facts. 

This,  of  course,  can  have  no  other  meaning 
than  that  the  great  historical  confessions  are 
not  the  final  expressions  of  Christian  conviction 
and  faith;  and,  in  fairness,  the  question  imme¬ 
diately  raised  when  anything  of  the  kind  is 
suggested,  must  be  answered:  the  question 

113 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

whether  these  ancient  creeds,  which  the  church 
so  long  has  affirmed,  must  be  done  away.  It  is 
a  pertinent  and  vital  question,  though  one  has 
to  be  precise  in  what  one  means  by  doing  away 
with  the  creeds.  In  a  very  real  sense  they  can 
never  be  done  away  with,  just  as  no  instrument, 
institution,  or  adventure  of  the  human  spirit, 
of  any  sort,  which  has  served  or  led  or  enriched 
any  area  or  epoch  of  human  life,  can  be  done 
away  with,  though  it  may  have  been  long  super¬ 
seded  in  practice  by  some  other  instrument, 
institution,  or  enterprise  amplified  and  adjusted 
to  the  enlarging  knowledge  and  capacity  of 
later  generations.  We  can  never  be  done  with 
that  clumsy  motor  now  in  the  National 
Museum,  which  failed  and  fell  with  Langley’s 
unsuccessful  flying  machine,  although  it  is  an 
awkward  impossibility  compared  with  the 
marvels  of  compression,  power,  and  speed 
which  drive  our  modern  airplanes.  We  can 
never  be  done  with  those  barren  school-rooms 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  and  the  austere 
teachers  who,  amid  the  rigors  of  suffering,  the 
alarms  of  savages,  and  the  loneliness  of  a  new 
land,  sternly  taught  the  children  of  the 
Plymouth  colony  the  rudiments  of  knowledge, 
however  poor  and  limited  they  seem  beside  our 
articulated  public  school  system  of  to-day. 
We  can  never  be  done  wTith  the  Magna  Chart  a, 

114? 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


notwithstanding  that,  as  a  statement  of  present- 
day  democracy,  property  rights,  and  social 
justice,  it  is  hopelessly  inadequate.  We  can 
never  be  done  with  Plato’s  Republic,  although 
its  conception  of  liberty  violates  the  deeper  and 
more  dominant  convictions  of  our  common 
social  morality  to-day.  All  of  these  have 
durable  significance  and  value.  They  were 
the  answer  of  their  age  to  the  challenge,  the 
need,  the  capacity,  the  character  of  their  con¬ 
temporary  life.  Without  them  we  would 
neither  have  nor  be  all  that  we  now  possess  and 
are.  From  them  developed  the  superiorities  we 
consider  peculiarly  our  own.  They  were  indis¬ 
pensable  and  adequate  in  their  own  times,  and 
they  contained  the  germinal  realities  from  which 
have  been  evolved  those  ampler  instruments 
that  meet  the  larger  knowledge  and  necessities 
of  our  present  world.  So  these  historic  creeds: 
they  are  the  church’s  answer  to  the  challenge 
of  the  day  in  which  they  were  formulated.  The 
young  church,  for  instance,  found  itself  faced  by 
that  semi-religion,  semi-philosophy  known  to 
history  as  gnosticism;  an  Asiatic  mysticism 
which  believed  in  good  gods  and  bad  gods  in 
competition,  and  in  gods  of  different  degrees; 
which  refused  to  receive  the  Old  Testament  as 
sacred  literature,  and  accepted  only  parts  of 
the  New  Testament;  which  denied  the  deity  of 

115 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


Jesus  and  lost  practical  piety  in  mystical 
speculation,  and  yet  claimed  to  be  Christian 
faith  and  theology  adapted  to  pagan  thought. 
In  answer  the  church  produced  the  Apostles’ 
Creed,  with  its  “I  believe  in  God  the  Father 
Almighty,  Maker  of  heaven  and  earth” — one 
supreme  creative  God;  “and  in  Jesus  Christ  his 
only  Son  our  Lord” — one  supreme  Incarnation. 
Later  the  growing  church  found  itself  inter¬ 
rogated  by  still  other  and  divergent  beliefs. 
Here  was  a  group  of  ascetics,  followers,  as  they 
affirmed,  of  the  historic  Jesus,  but  conceiving 
him  as  a  prophet  like  Moses,  calling  them  back 
to  a  primitive  Judaism.  Here  were  more  subtle 
LTnitarian  thinkers,  claiming  to  be  Christians, 
but  denying  the  reality  of  the  personal  Son  and 
the  Spirit  and  declaring  that  Father,  Son  and 
Spirit  were  but  alternate  manifestations  of  the 
one  God.  Here  were  others  who  claimed  that 
Jesus  was  but  a  man  who  had  been  deified.  It 
would  have  been  neither  difficult  nor  surprising 
for  the  church  to  have  accepted  any  of  these 
beliefs,  but  it  would  have  been  fatal.  To  have 
accepted  any  of  them  would  have  meant  for 
Christianity  to  sink  back  into  Judaism,  on  the 
one  hand,  or  paganism  on  the  other.  So  the 
church  replied  with  the  great  creed  of  Nicea: 

“We  believe  in  one  God,  the  Father  Almighty, 
Creator  of  all  things  visible  and  invisible;  and 

116 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


in  one  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  the  Son  of  God,  Only 
Begotten  of  the  Father,  that  is,  of  the  substance 
of  the  Father,  God  of  God,  Light  of  Light,  very 
God  of  very  God,  begotten,  not  made,  being  of 
the  same  substance  with  the  Father,  by  whom 
all  things  were  made  in  heaven  and  in  earth,  who 
for  us  men  and  for  our  salvation  came  down 
from  heaven,  was  incarnate,  was  made  man, 
suffered,  rose  again  the  third  day,  ascended  into 
the  heavens,  and  He  will  come  to  judge  the 
living  and  the  dead.  And  in  the  Holy  Ghost.” 

That  answered  the  challenge  the  church 
faced  in  those  great  fourth-century  days.  We 
can  never  be  done  with  that,  in  fact  or  in  value, 
nor  cut  ourselves  completely  off  from  the  gigan¬ 
tic  men — nameless  as  they  may  be — who 
shaped  those  majestic  sentences  as  the  literary 
expression  of  inexpressible  truth,  just  as  we  can 
never  cut  ourselves  completely  off  from  the 
men  who,  in  that  humble  upper  room  in  Phila¬ 
delphia,  phrased  their  passion  for  reasonable 
freedom  in  the  Declaration  of  Independence 
and,  later,  in  the  Constitution  of  the  new 
republic.  But  our  American  democracy  has 
not  remained  within  the  original  definitions  of 
either  of  those  imperishable  documents.  The 
Declaration,  laying  down  as  its  premise  that  all 
men  are  created  free  and  equal,  and  that  they 
are  endowed  by  their  Creator  with  the  inalien- 

117 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


able  rights  of  life,  liberty  and  the  pursuit  of 
happiness,  was  written  and  signed  by  men  who 
bought,  owned,  and  sold  slaves.  During  a 
period  of  one  hundred  thirty-four  years  the 
Constitution  has  been  found  to  be  inadequate 
for  the  expression  of  a  growing  democratic 
ideal  no  less  than  nineteen  times,  and  its  inade¬ 
quacies  have  been  corrected  by  amendments. 
While  supplementing  and  defining  still  more 
concretely  the  content  of  the  democratic  con¬ 
ception  of  society,  of  which  the  Constitution 
was  the  original  expression,  State  constitutions, 
municipal  charters,  and  Congressional  and 
legislative  acts  prescribe  rights,  privileges, 
prohibitions,  restraints,  and  duties  of  which 
the  makers  of  the  Constitution  never  dreamed, 
because  the  realities  of  enlarging  democratic 
society  which  have  called  forth  these  prescrip¬ 
tions  were  beyond  their  experience. 

When  it  is  said,  then,  that  doubtless  we 
shall  some  time  come  to  new  phraseologies  of 
our  Christian  belief  and  conviction,  what  is 
meant  is  that  Christian  thought,  the  Christian 
Church,  when  it  shall  have  appraised  and  re¬ 
organized  the  new  and  multiplying  factors  of 
contemporary  life,  must  speak  to  the  present 
day  those  supernatural  facts  of  Christianity, 
as  commandingly  and  pertinently  as  Christian 
thought,  the  Christian  Church,  through  the 

118 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


historic  creeds  spoke  them,  to  the  days  whose 
needs  and  challenge  those  historic  creeds  met. 
How,  then,  shall  we  who  will  not  write  any  new 
creed,  but  must  have  one  for  ourselves,  dis¬ 
cover  it? 

I 

The  answer  to  that  question  is  fairly  obvious. 
We  shall  come  to  our  creed  to-day  as  the  makers 
of  these  ancient  confessions  came  to  them. 
Our  distinctive  materials  of  faith  may  be  some¬ 
what  different,  but  their  source  is  the  same, 
namely,  life  lived  in  the  conviction  of  and 
venture  on  those  data  of  the  supernatural  which 
lie  at  the  heart  of  essential  Christianity.  This 
presupposes  the  reasonable  and  religious  atti¬ 
tude  toward  tradition — that  it  is  a  loyalty  to 
the  spirit  of  the  creative  past,  not  a  duplication 
of  its  letter.  “That  good  thing”  which  was 
committed  unto  Timothy  to  be  guarded  through 
the  Holy  Spirit  was  not  a  formal  thesis,  but  a 
living  truth.  We  shall  remain  true  to  the 
faith  of  the  fathers,  not  as  we  maintain  that 
faith  unchanged  in  its  specific  phraseologies 
and  definitions,  but  as  we  bring  to  our  life  and 
time  the  spirit  of  inquiry,  of  honesty,  of  loyalty 
to  truth,  of  practical  daring  in  belief,  which 
they  brought  to  their  life  and  time;  as  we  set 
the  indispensable  facts  of  Christianity,  not  any 
temporal  forms,  in  the  center  of  our  life  as  they 

119 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

set  them  in  the  center  of  their  life;  as  we  appraise 
and  define  the  meaning  of  Christianity  in 
relation  to  our  knowledge  and  social  develop¬ 
ment,  as  they  appraised  and  defined  it  in  rela¬ 
tion  to  their  knowledge  and  social  development. 
For  the  Christians  of  the  first  century  did  not 
begin,  as  most  of  us  have  begun,  with  a  creed 
ready  made  to  their  hand.  They  began  with 
Christ,  not  as  a  doctrine  but  as  a  Person,  not 
in  a  theology  but  in  a  fellowship.  The  Hebrews 
and  Gentiles  who  became  Christians  after 
Jesus,  in  bodily  and  visible  form,  had  gone 
from  the  earth,  those  who,  perhaps  more  surely 
than  Saint  Paul,  had  never  known  Christ  after 
the  flesh,  were  nevertheless  won  by  a  contact 
of  life  rather  than  by  an  appeal  to  the  intellect. 
In  Paul’s  difficult  but  unmistakable  phrase, 
Christ  was  revealed  in  them  rather  than  to 
them.  They  did  not  so  much  meditate  and 
analyze  and  argue  for  his  deity,  his  redemptive 
death,  and  the  pledge  of  immortality  in  his 
resurrection;  to  paraphrase  Browning’s  ques¬ 
tion,  they  gave  these  facts  their  vote  to  be 
true  and  conducted  life  upon  their  truth.  They 
lived  as  men  and  women  who  had  been  redeemed 
by  the  Son  of  God  and  were  sure  of  eternal 
life.  In  other  words,  the  Christians  before  the 
creeds  had  an  experience.  Scholars,  slaves, 
publicans,  priests,  fishermen,  physicians,  living 

120 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


in  queens’  palaces  or  the  ghettos  of  intolerant 
cities,  individually  experienced  that  in  Christ 
they  were  new  creatures.  They  knew  that 
they  had  passed  from  death  unto  life.  While 
they  were  yet  sinners  Christ  had  died  for  them, 
and  sin  had  no  more  dominion  over  them.  In 
their  sufferings  they  discovered  that  his  grace 
was  sufficient  for  them,  in  their  weakness  that 
his  strength  was  made  perfect.  Whatever 
may  have  been  the  process  by  which,  as  latter- 
day  scholarship  tells  us,  the  idea  of  Jesus  was 
developed  into  that  of  Lord,  the  Christians  of 
the  New  Testament  and  the  generations  imme¬ 
diately  following  were  not  concerned  with  the 
development  of  the  idea;  they  were  dominated 
by  the  fact.  It  was  the  love  of  Christ,  not  any 
theory  of  Christ,  which  constrained  them. 

They  had  also — though  far  too  little  has  been 
made  of  it  in  latter-day  thinking — more  than 
individual  experience.  Neither  a  few  men  nor 
a  multitude  of  them,  having  only  separated 
individual  experiences,  if  such  a  condition  can 
be  imagined,  could  ever  account  for  historical 
Christianity  nor  move  toward  the  inauguration 
of  the  kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  The  early 
Christians,  from  the  beginning,  found  them¬ 
selves  not  only  in  new  relations  to  God,  but 
also  in  new  relations  to  one  another.  They 
recognized  their  redemption  in  and  by  Christ 

121 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


not  only  as  making  them  individually  new 
creatures,  but  as  giving  them  new  connections. 
It  not  simply  transfigured  their  experiences; 
it  transformed  their  social  activities.  It  can 
hardly  be  considered  an  accident  that  the  word 
“saint”  never  appears  in  the  singular  in  the 
New  Testament,  but  always  in  the  plural.  It 
is  among  a  plurality  of  saints  that  the  great 
manifestations  of  the  Divine  Presence  are  made 
—the  demonstration  of  Pentecost,  the  descents 
of  the  Holy  Spirit,  the  shaking  of  the  place  of 
prayer,  the  renewed  boldness  of  the  proclama¬ 
tion  of  the  word  of  God,  the  signs  and  wonders 
which  furnished  the  credentials  of  the  apostolic 
power. 

Of  course  experience  of  this  kind  involved 
very  real  faith.  Men  and  women  did  not  come 
to  a  sense  of  salvation  from  sin,  of  sustaining 
grace  from  and  in  Christ,  of  certain  hope  of 
immortality,  without  believing,  in  a  very  real 
way,  some  definite  things  about  the  Christ 
through  whom  they  claimed  the  experience. 
But  it  was  what  might  be  called  an  instinctive 
faith;  it  did  not  inquire  what  was  involved 
beyond  the  faith  itself.  The  men  who,  for 
example,  found  themselves  to  be  new  creatures 
in  Christ  Jesus,  believed  themselves  to  be 
redeemed;  but  they  did  not  first  ask  for  or 
possess  a  theory  of  atonement.  The  men  and 

122 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


women  who  called  Jesus  Lord  did  not  stop  to 
inquire  what  was  the  relation  of  the  human 
Jesus  to  the  metaphysical  Trinity.  They  did 
not  begin  by  asking  for  explanations  of  an 
hypothesis;  they  began  by  risking  their  lives 
upon  their  confidence  in  Jesus.  Their  faith 
was  in  a  fact  which  they  were  living  to  demon¬ 
strate,  not  in  a  description  of  it  which  they 
were  arguing  to  defend.  So  that  there  is 
nothing  at  which  to  be  surprised  in  the  circum¬ 
stance  that  the  New  Testament,  while  it  is 
full  of  the  materials  out  of  which  theological 
dogmas  and  philosophical  creeds  have  been 
made,  itself  is  peculiarly  free  from  them. 
Untrained  men  and  women,  rather  isolated 
from  the  main  currents  of  contemporary 
intellectual  and  social  life,  but  with  a  common 
experience  of  unprecedented  personal  meaning, 
would  naturally  rejoice  in  the  facts  of  the 
experience  rather  than  attempt  to  define  them. 
It  is  the  actualities  of  life  which  are  of  primary 
significance,  and  while  those  actualities  will 
eventually  express  themselves  in  a  formula, 
the  formula  can  never  precisely  describe  the 
life  which  moves  beneath  it.  “No  creed  has 
ever  been  framed  so  grim  that  sweet  and 
saintly  souls  have  not  professed  it,  nor  so 
kindly  that  it  has  not  harbored  sinners.”1 


1  Thayer,  Democracy,  Discipline  and  Peace,  p.  37.  Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

123 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


This  priority  of  religious  experience  which 
has  already  been  pointed  out;  this  staking  of 
life,  with  its  social  consequences,  upon  the 
data  of  the  supernatural  which  lie  at  the 
foundations  of  Christianity — in  a  word,  this 
necessity  of  Christian  experience  as  the 
authentic  source  of  a  Christian  creed — is  all  the 
more  to  be  emphasized  to-day  because  some 
of  those  who  are  prescribing  reconstructions  of 
faith  seem  to  exhibit  little  material  for  the 
work.  There  are  many  contemporary  sug¬ 
gestions  as  to  the  theology  which  we  must 
formulate  for  the  present  social  order,  and  not 
a  few  demands  that  the  church  shall  produce 
a  modernized  creed  which  the  industrial  world 
will  accept;  all  of  which  is  attractive  in  language 
but  rather  inaccurate  of  insight.  A  social 
order  cannot  possibly  have  any  theology  and 
the  industrial  world  is  unable  to  accept  any¬ 
thing.  These  are  convenient  generalizations 
without  specific  reality.  One  might  as  well 
insist  that  a  species  should  have  color  or 
architecture  shape.  Men  and  women  of  the 
present  social  order  can  possess  a  theology, 
and  industrialists,  both  employers  and 
employees,  both  capitalists  and  union  leaders, 
can  accept  a  creed;  for  possessing  and  accepting 
are  the  activities  of  individuals.  But  they 
cannot  do  either  as  an  initial  enterprise.  Be- 

124 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 

fore  a  creed  can  become  a  standard  of  personal 
belief  it  has  to  be  discovered  as  a  description  of 
personal  experience.  A  creed  is  not  something 
you  believe  in,  it  is  something  which  tells  what 
you  do  believe  in.  Before  men  and  women  of 
the  present  social  order  can  possess  a  theology 
they  must  confess  religion;  before  industrialists 
can  accept  a  Christian  creed  they  will  have  to 
adventure  upon  Christ.  Professor  Ellwood 
writes  that  he  would  find  ‘The  religion  needed 
by  the  modern  world  in  a  more  rational,  re¬ 
vitalized,  socialized  Christianity.”  But  the 
sentence  means  nothing  whatever  unless  that 
Christianity  is,  first  of  all,  the  experience  and 
expression  of  more  rational,  revitalized,  and 
socialized  Christians.  A  creed  has  no  evange¬ 
listic  character.  It  explains  to  the  intellect 
that  evangelism  upon  which  the  will  has 
already  adventured.  It  is  a  bulwark  of  defense, 
not  a  weapon  of  attack.  It  safeguards  a  faith 
already  occupied;  it  does  not  win  recruits  by 
creating  faith.  The  Arians  passed  out  of 
history,  not  because  they  were  converted  by 
the  creed  which  survives  with  the  name  of 
Athanasius,  but  because  the  experience  out  of 
which  they  drew  their  Arianism  was  too  small 
a  fragment  of  the  complete  reality  which  was 
to  be  experienced  in  Christ.  A  durable  creed 
can  be  erected  only  upon  an  amplitude  of 

125 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


experience.  A  living  creed,  in  short,  is  impos¬ 
sible  except  as  the  expression  of  a  living  faith; 
and  faith,  as  Kirsopp  Lake  has  written,  in  some¬ 
what  different  associations,  is  not  belief  in  spite 
of  evidence,  but  life  in  scorn  of  consequences. 

II 

Thus  far  this  discussion  has  dealt  with  these 
early  Christians  as  living  their  lives  wholly  by 
themselves  which,  of  course,  they  could  not« 
long  have  done.  Their  experience  could  not 
be  maintained  in  isolation,  untouched  by  the 
influences  which  moved  around  it.  Those 
Christians  were  constantly  in  contact  with  a 
theory  and  mode  of  life  totally  different  from 
their  own.  We  read  with  little  more  than 
incidental  interest  that  page  in  the  book  of  Acts 
describing  the  scene  as  Paul  ceases  his  ministry 
to  the  Jews,  to  whom,  heretofore,  he  has  confined 
his  preaching,  and  turns  to  the  Gentiles  with 
the  gospel  of  Christ.  For  all  our  indifference, 
however,  that  day  the  religious  history  of  the 
world  was  directed  into  new  channels.  For 
Christianity  did  not  make  great  progress  in 
Palestine,  the  land,  and  among  the  Hebrews, 
the  people,  in  and  among  whom  it  was  born. 
It  flourished  among  foreigners  and  on  alien 
soil.  There  are  no  quarrels  like  family  quarrels 
and  no  antagonisms  so  inflexible  as  those 

126 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


between  brothers;  so  Judaism  waged  unrelenting 
war  upon  Christianity,  though  the  promise  of 
Christ  was  written  indelibly  on  every  page  of 
her  Sacred  Scriptures,  and  her  age-long  expec¬ 
tation  was  of  the  coming  of  One  who,  when  he 
came  to  his  own,  his  own  received  him  not.  It 
was  in  Greek  lands  and  among  Greek-speaking 
pagans  that  early  Christianity  won  its  epoch- 
making  victories,  as  the  Christian  disciples, 
scattered  abroad  by  persecutions,  went  every¬ 
where  preaching  the  gospel. 

Once  established  as  a  force  to  be  reckoned 
with,  once  commanding  the  allegiance  of  many 
lives  and  proving  its  power  in  the  regeneration 
of  personal  character  and  the  reformation  of 
social  conduct,  the  world  amid  which  it  moved 
and  within  which  it  wrought  its  demonstra¬ 
tions,  challenged  it  to  explain  itself,  its  expe¬ 
rience,  its  outlook  upon  life,  the  motive  sources 
of  its  courage,  its  joy,  its  endurance,  its  purposes 
and  hopes.  And  that  is  a  challenge  which 
faces  Christianity  at  every  stage  in  the  history 
of  the  world  since  the  Nazarenes  disturbed  the 
peace  of  official  Jerusalem.  That  scene  wherein 
the  two  disciples  are  surrounded  by  the  rulers 
and  elders  and  scribes  and  the  high  priest  and 
his  colleagues — the  political,  the  religious,  and 
the  social  leadership  of  the  Jewish  world — and 
are  asked,  as  the  author  of  Acts  reports,  “By 

127 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


what  power,  or  in  what  name,  have  ye  done 
this?”  is  the  figure  of  the  church,  in  every 
century,  summoned  by  the  life  of  the  world 
around  it  to  give  a  reason  for  its  claim,  its 
position  and  its  purposes.  So  the  Greek  world 
to  which  Christianity  had  gone  and  in  which, 
for  two  hundred  years,  it  had  won  its  way 
against  racial  prejudice,  religious  tradition, 
intellectual  contempt,  and  imperial  arms, 
questioned  it.  What  did  it  believe?  What 
had  it  to  declare  concerning  the  profound 
realities  of  the  soul  and  the  soul’s  career  through 
time? 

Of  course  the  heart  of  the  whole  challenge 
was  the  Person  of  Christ.  The  fundamental 
question,  fundamental  both  to  Christianity  and 
to  the  inquiry  of  the  world  of  the  fourth  century, 
was  as  to  the  relation  of  God  and  Jesus  Christ. 
Was  he  a  man?  Was  he  a  superior  but  not 
supreme  creation?  Was  he  truly  God?  One 
can  easily  apprehend  how  such  questions  would 
expand  in  the  course  of  years  into  a  great 
characteristic  inquisition  by  contemporary 
thought;  and  the  church,  through  its  intellectual 
and  spiritual  leaders,  carefully  appraising  the 
inquiry,  had  to  answer.  It  had  to  answer, 
moreover,  in  terms  which  the  Greek  mind  of 
the  time  could  understand;  which  means  that 
it  had  to  express  Christian  realities  to  minds 

128 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


that  had  no  Christian  vocabulary  or  pre- 
Christian  preparation  of  outlook.  The  answer 
which  might  have  met  the  questionings  of  the 
Jew  would  leave  the  Greek  untouched.  To  the 
Jew  the  Christian  apologist  could  quote  the 
Old  Testament,  for  Jesus’  God  was  the  God  of 
his  Hebrew  fathers,  his  sacred  books  were  the 
sacred  books  his  Jewish  kindred  had  reverenced 
and  read  for  a  thousand  years,  the  divine 
tradition  at  which  his  growing  mind  had  kindled 
was  the  heroic  story  of  his  people’s  mighty  past 
and  majestic  piety.  Its  prophets  had  inspired 
his  enthusiasm,  its  psalmists  had  sustained  his 
devotion,  its  seers  had  wakened  and  colored  his 
hopes.  But  the  Greek  was  a  stranger  to  that 
entire  mode  and  mood  of  thought.  His  gods, 
popularly  conceived,  were  little  better  than 
himself ;  stronger,  more  knowing,  yet  not  infal¬ 
lible  nor  secure  against  human  cunning; 
immortal,  but  supermen  rather  than  ineffably 
divine.  Seriously  considered,  they  were  sym¬ 
bols  of  the  divine  reality  which  existed  behind 
them. 

To  put  it  in  a  word,  the  Jew  thought  of  God 
as  a  Person  ruling  over  the  universe  of  men  and 
matter;  the  Greek  thought  of  God  as  Substance, 
somehow  permeating  the  universe  of  men  and 
matter;  and  one  of  the  initial  difficulties  which 
Christianity  had  to  meet  was  that  of  finding 

129 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

words,  in  the  materialistic  vocabulary  of  the 
Greeks,  with  which  to  express  spiritual  ideas 
quite  foreign  to  the  Greek  mind.  The  church 
had  to  explain  the  personal  Christ  to  the  Greek 
world  that  thought  of  God  as  substance  rather 
than  a  personality.  So  we  get  the  magnificent 
but,  to  us,  almost  incomprehensible  language 
of  Nicene  Creed: 

“We  believe  ...  in  one  Lord  Jesus  Christ, 
the  Son  of  God,  Only  Begotten  of  the  Father, 
that  is,  of  the  substance  of  the  Father,  God  of 
God,  Light  of  Light,  very  God  of  very  God, 
begotten,  not  made,  being  of  the  same  substance 
with  the  Father.” 

That  was  the  answer  of  the  Christian  Church 
to  the  intellectual  challenge  of  the  Greek  world 
of  3 25  a.  d.  in  respect  of  the  person  of  Christ. 
In  the  words  of  Canon  Gore,  the  church  passed 
“from  holding  her  faith  simply  as  a  faith,  to 
holding  it  with  a  clear  consciousness  of  its 
intellectual  meaning  and  limits,  with  ready 
formulas  and  clearly-worked-out  terminology.”2 

That  answer,  however,  would  have  meant 
nothing  to  the  twelve  disciples  with  Jesus  at 
Caesarea  Philippi.  All  they  needed,  as  the 
explanation  of  their  experience  and  the  faith 
created  by  it,  were  the  simple  words  of  Peter  to 
Jesus,  “Thou  art  the  Christ.”  But  the  simple 


2  Gore,  The  Incarnation  of  Our  Lord,  p.  95.  Charles  Scribner’s  Sons. 

130 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


statement  which  satisfied  the  disciples  with 
Jesus  in  his  days  among  men  would  have  meant 
nothing  to  the  Greeks  three  centuries  later. 
Nevertheless,  all  that  is  in  this  complex  and 
theological  creed  of  the  fourth  century  is  con¬ 
tained  in  germ  in  Simon  Peter’s  simple  words 
as  he  looked  into  the  face  of  Christ.  The 
difference  is  a  difference  in  the  world  and  the 
mind  to  which  Jesus  had  to  be  explained. 

It  is  allowable  now  to  say  that  the  answer  of 
the  Nicene  Creed  means  nothing  of  practical 
religious  value  to  us  to-day.  We  do  not  think 
of  God  either  as  ancient  Hebrew  religion 
thought  of  him  or  as  he  was  conceived.by  ancient 
Greek  philosophy.  The  Jew  thought  of  God 
as  a  Person,  dwelling  in  a  place  apart;  when  he 
was  present  with  his  people  he  visited  them  and 
came  down.  The  Greek  thought  of  God  as 
substance  behind  the  appearances  that  con¬ 
stitute  our  vision  of  the  finite  universe.  We 
think  of  God  as  the  immanent  Spirit,  living, 
feeling,  acting,  in  the  energies  of  the  universe 
and  the  experiences  of  men.  “Some  one  is 
calling  where  the  winds  are  sighing;  some  one 
is  moving  where  the  leaves  are  rustling;  some 
one  is  yearning  toward  the  human  heart  where 
the  waves  are  breaking  on  the  shore.”3  The 
Jew  thought  of  God  in  terms  of  power,  the 


*  Morrison,  The  Wearing  of  Glory,  p.  168.  George  H.  Doran  Company. 

131 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


Greek  thought  of  him  in  terms  of  matter;  we 
think  of  him  in  terms  of  character  and  life. 
There  is  a  double  significance  in  that  as  we 
consider  Christ.  On  the  one  hand,  it  is  through 
Christ  that  we  have  come  to  this  nobler  con¬ 
ception  of  God;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  in 
terms  of  this  conception  of  God  that  we  must 
realize  anew  the  meaning  of  Christ  for  con¬ 
temporary  thought.  Christ  is  God,  and  must 
be  so  interpreted  after  being  so  experienced, 
not  in  substance  but  in  character,  not  in  ma¬ 
terial  but  in  life. 

Ill 

Here,  then,  to  sum  up  what  has  been  said, 
are  these  data  of  the  supernatural  which  are 
the  very  heart  of  Christian  faith:  the  self- 
consciousness  of  Jesus,  his  redemptive  death, 
and  the  consummating  mystery  of  his  resur¬ 
rection.  Here  also  are  these  majestic  declara¬ 
tions  of  the  faith,  developed  through  living  upon 
those  data,  which  the  church  made  to  the  mind 
and  experience  of  that  early  century  to  which 
these  declarations  were  necessary.  And  here, 
now,  is  our  own  age,  with  its  characteristic 
knowledge,  its  essential  spirit,  its  ideal  and 
habit  of  life,  all  so  different  from  that  of  the 
centuries  which  called  out  these  historic  creeds; 
and  this,  our  own  age,  is  now  challenging  the 
church  and  Christianity,  as  the  third  and 

132 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


fourth  centuries  challenged  the  third  and 
fourth  century  church  and  Christianity,  to 
declare  the  meaning  of  its  faith,  to  interpret  its 
Christ  and  God  in  terms  of  the  age  itself.  That 
is  the  demand  now  pressed  upon  organized 
Christianity  from  several  directions  and  in 
various  forms,  which  may  be  phrased  as  the 
demand  for  a  living  creed. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  we  can  give  some 
consideration  to  the  remark  which  one  inva¬ 
riably  meets  after  any  suggestion  of  revision 
or  restatement  of  the  traditional  faith.  Imme¬ 
diately  one  is  reminded  that  with  these  ancient 
creeds  the  church  has  won  its  world  and  is 
winning  still  its  victories  for  the  gospel;  why, 
therefore,  should  we  seek  for  anything  different? 
To  that  there  are  two  replies:  First,  that  in  a 
very  real  and  fundamental  sense  the  church 
has  never  won  anything  with  a  creed;  it  wins 
its  victories  with  its  Christ.  The  creed,  as  was 
suggested  earlier  in  the  chapter,  is  not  a  weapon 
of  attack;  it  is  a  bulwark  of  defense.  But  in 
another  sense,  of  course,  the  creed  has  unmis¬ 
takable  value  as  a  statement  of  the  experience 
and  certainty  to  which  Christianity,  through 
the  church,  invites  the  world  it  must  win.  The 
reason  that  these  ancient  creeds  have  so  long 
maintained  that  value  is  that,  until  compara¬ 
tively  recently,  the  mind  of  the  world  which  was 

133 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


interested  in  any  sort  of  a  creed,  has  been 
sympathetic  with  and  fairly  similar  to  the  mind 
of  the  Greek  world  of  fifteen  hundred  years  ago. 
In  other  words,  it  has  been  philosophical  rather 
than  practical.  Quite  otherwise,  now,  the 
dominant  interests  of  men  to-day  are  practical. 
For  illustration,  to  say  nothing  of  the  three 
thousand  patents  upon  mechanical  devices 
which  are  registered  every  month  in  the  United 
States  alone,  of  primary  and  fundamental 
inventions  of  the  first  rank,  there  have  been 
almost  twice  as  many  made  since  1800  as  were 
made  in  all  preceding  time.  Education  offers 
corroborative  witness.  Down  to  our  day  it 
dealt  with  speculative,  cultural,  and  literary 
concerns  rather  than  with  those  of  practical 
experience  and  utility;  educators  of  to-day  are 
in  peril  of  going  to  quite  the  opposite  extreme. 
Between  the  minds  of  the  theologians  of  fifty 
years  ago  and  those  of  fifteen  hundred  years 
ago  there  was  not  as  much  difference  in  view¬ 
point  and  interest  as  there  is  between  the 
religious  thinkers  of  to-day  and  those  of  the 
last  generation.  The  intellectual  life  of  the 
centuries  preceding  our  own  generation  very 
largely  occupied  the  realm  inhabited  by  the 
creed  makers  of  the  philosophical  past. 

The  second  reply  to  be  made  to  the  invariable 
remark  that  it  is  with  these  ancient  creeds  the 

134 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


church  is  winning  its  world,  is  that,  during 
recent  years,  neither  the  church  nor  the  creeds 
have  been  winning  the  world.  It  is  time  that 
Christian  men  and  women  escaped  from  the 
optimism  of  sentimentality  through  which  they 
see  the  nations  of  the  world  becoming  the 
kingdoms  of  our  Lord.  Whether  or  not  Dean 
Inge  is  correct  in  his  declaration  that  true 
Christianity  will  never  be  acceptable  to  the 
majority  because  it  is  too  stern  and  uncom¬ 
promising,  it  is  not  to  be  doubted  that  the 
Christianity  of  the  church  to-day  is  not  accepted 
by  anything  like  a  majority  of  the  world. 
Christ  has  been  making  his  way,  through  the 
evangelism  of  individuals,  in  limited  and 
personal  fashion,  though  not  so  triumphantly 
that  the  church  can  make  capital  of  its  effec¬ 
tiveness;  but  the  world — its  organized  thought, 
its  interrelated  systems  of  scholarship,  finance, 
statecraft,  industry,  culture,  and  society — 
has  been  only  sentimentally  influenced  by  the 
church  of  our  generation,  and  is  largely  indif¬ 
ferent  to  its  standards.  The  challenge  to-day 
from  alien  civilizations  and  from  alienated 
social,  industrial,  and  intellectual  life  at  home, 
is  for  a  restatement  of  Christianity  in  com¬ 
manding  terms  of  modern  experience  and  under¬ 
standing. 

This  demand  that  Christianity  shall  be 

135 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

restated  in  terms  of  modern  experience  and 
understanding  is  not  an  arbitrary  summons; 
the  language  with  which  religion  has  expressed 
its  beliefs  has  always  been  forged  in  the  fires  of 
contemporary  experience,  has  always  been 
colored  by  the  light  of  contemporary  institu¬ 
tions,  has  always  been  delimited  by  contem¬ 
porary  knowledge  of  the  natural  world.  Seven¬ 
teen  hundred  years  ago,  for  illustration,  kings 
were  absolute  and  war  was  without  our  modern 
discriminations  between  personal  and  national 
interests.  So  kings  ransomed  their  captive 
princes  by  paying  whatever  sums  were  required. 
It  was  natural,  in  such  a  condition  of  society 
and  thought,  that  the  church’s  theory  of  the 
Atonement  should  be  that  Satan  had  captured 
mankind  and  that  God  gave  the  death  of  Christ 
as  a  ransom  to  Satan  by  which  mankind  was 
set  at  liberty.  Fantastic  as  the  theory  seems  to 
us,  it  has  the  dignity  of  being  considered  by 
Saint  Augustine  and  defended  by  Origen. 
The  central  truth  of  Christianity  is  in  the 
theory,  but  the  form  of  it  is  due  to  the  experience 
and  habit  of  the  age  in  which  it  rose.  It  is  this 
inevitable  influence  of  the  age  upon  its  forms  of 
belief  and  expression  which  explains  the  inci¬ 
dent,  related  by  the  author  of  Painted 
Windows ,  of  “a  Japanese  who,  after  listening 
with  corrugated  brow  to  the  painful  exposition 

136 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


of  a  recent  Duke  of  Argyll  concerning  the 
Trinity  in  Unity,  and  the  Unity  in  Trinity, 
suddenly  exclaimed  with  radiant  face,  ‘Ah,  yes, 
I  see,  a  Committee.’  ”4 

Protestantism  is  much  concerned  to-day  with 
what  it  calls,  to  the  point  of  wearisome  reiter¬ 
ation,  the  crisis  that  confronts  it;  and 
apparently  it  seeks  to  meet  whatever  crisis 
there  is  with  organizations,  institutions, 
enterprises  in  foreign  lands  and  among  foreign- 
born  populations  at  home,  and  with  coordinated 
interventions  in  industrial  and  social  affairs 
and  operations.  These  are  doubtless  imper¬ 
ative;  beyond  question  they  prophesy  more 
effective  application  of  Christianity  to  everyday 
life.  But  they  will  remain  fragmentary  in 
character  and  impermanent  in  result  until 
Protestantism  shall  enunciate  anew  the  central 
facts  of  Christian  faith  from  which  it  sustains 
its  experience  and  by  which  it  directs  its 
purposes  and  hopes,  and  shall  enunciate  them 
so  illumined  and  reinforced  by  the  indubitable 
realities  of  contemporary  experience  and 
knowledge,  that  they  shall  command  the  mind 
and  will  and  heart  of  men  as  the  undeniable 
voice  of  living  truth. 

That  sentence  touches  the  circumference  of 


4  Painted  Windows,  p.  72.  Courtesy  of  G.  P.  Putnam’s  Sons,  Publishers, 
New  York  and  London. 

137 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


a  subject  which  might  well  occupy  a  volume; 
but  a  pathway  into  it  may  be  suggested  by 
repeating  an  implication  remarked  in  an  earlier 
chapter.  The  age  of  the  creeds,  as  was  already 
said,  was  an  age  of  philosophy.  Science  was  not 
yet  born  and  democracy  had  not  been  dreamed. 
But  our  age  is  utterly  controlled  by  and  respon¬ 
sive  to  those  very  influences  of  science  and 
democracy;  and  Christian  truth  which  does  not 
relate  itself  to  them  speaks  a  language  our  age 
cannot  understand.  Christian  thinking  and 
Christian  propaganda  must  take  their  central 
facts,  these  data  of  the  supernatural  of  which 
enough  has  been  said,  conceiving  God  as 
character  and  life,  and  Jesus,  in  his  experience, 
his  death,  his  resurrection,  as  God’s  revelation 
of  himself,  and  must  set  those  facts  in  the  light 
of  and  agreeable  to  the  experience  of  an  age  of 
science  and  democracy.  That  will  be,  not  to 
set  aside  the  ancient  philosophical  creeds,  but 
to  fulfill  them,  not  to  abandon  the  faith  of  the 
fathers,  but  to  gather  the  fruits  which  the 
fathers  planted  and  of  which  they  partook,  and 
which  have  sustained  the  life  of  believing  men 
down  all  the  centuries  that  have  dreamed  or 
thundered  through  the  garden  of  the  world. 

To  those  particularly  interested  in  homiletical 
values  we  seem  to  have  reached  a  place  of  little 
immediate  usefulness.  We  shall  not  write  any 

138 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


new  statements  of  the  faith;  we  shall  continue 
to  live  our  lives  with  the  narrowed  interests 
and  common  activities  of  that  broad  obscurity 
in  which  is  unobtrusively  enacted  the  drama 
of  innumerable  mankind.  But  there  are  other 
than  homiletic  values  to  which  we  may  profit¬ 
ably  give  consideration;  and  it  is  precisely  in 
their  narrowed  interests  and  commonplace 
activities  that  contemporary  men  will  make 
their  contribution  to  that  community  of  reli¬ 
gious  experience  and  apprehension  which  alone 
can  inspire  and  sustain  an  adequate  and  timely 
creed.  “The  test  of  a  religious  faith  lies  in  the 
kind  of  behavior  it  inspires  and  controls,  and 
in  the  contribution  it  makes  to  human  well¬ 
being.”5  Men  and  women  who  know  it  is  not 
their  work  to  write  a  creed  for  the  times  have 
yet  the  obligation  to  adventure  on  a  conduct 
of  life  and  faith  out  of  which,  in  the  hands  of 
others,  the  living  creed  eventually  shall  rise; 
and  that  is  no  small  or  easy  labor.  There  is 
to-day  the  temptation  to  fear;  there  are  the 
revivals  of  pagan  faiths  abroad  and  the  indul¬ 
gence  of  pagan  morality  at  home;  there  is  the 
apparently  increasing  unbelief,  in  practice  at 
least,  of  the  Christian  world;  the  disregard  of 
law,  of  ancient  virtue  and  of  justice.  All  of 


*  Jones,  The  Faith  That  Enquires,  p.  66.  Reprinted  by  permission  of 
The  Macmillan  Company. 

139 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 


these  seem  to  menace  the  Christianity  we  have 
presumed  to  know  and  exemplify.  But  as  - 
John  Milton  put  it,  4 ‘So  truth  be  in  the  field 
.  .  .  we  do  injuriously  to  misdoubt  her 
strength/’  and  it  is  at  once  the  opportunity 
and  obligation  of  men  to-day  to  live  actually 
upon  the  truth  of  Christ  and  the  God  of  char¬ 
acter,  purpose,  and  life  whom  we  see  in  him. 
Christian  faith  has  no  meaning  to-day  unless 
men  live  their  actual  lives,  with  their  annoy¬ 
ances,  their  difficulties,  their  irritating  and 
profitless  frictions,  upon  the  truth  of  Christ  and 
God  that  lies  at  the  heart  of  the  world.  It 
seems  to  have  been  easy  to  do  that  in  the 
simpler  and  unhurried  generations  past,  when 
Simeon  looked  for  the  consolation  of  Israel 
or  Saint  Francis  sang  the  Canticle  of  the  Sun. 
It  seems  a  very  unpractical  thing  to  attempt 
to-day.  But  it  is  precisely  that  which  has  to 
be  accomplished  if  Christianity  is  to  be  per¬ 
manently  victorious  in  a  good  world;  and  it  is 
not  Christianity — which  is  as  elusive  and  unreal 
as  a  social  order  or  a  species — it  is  Christians 
who  are  to  win  the  world  by  lives  whose  secret 
the  creed  is  to  describe.  It  is  of  small  impor¬ 
tance  whose  shall  be  the  gifted  minds  to  phrase 
the  modern  creed;  what  is  of  immeasurable 
importance  is  that  we  are  the  Christians  who 
have,  first,  to  live  it. 


140 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


But,  approximating  to  homiletical  values, 
Christian  men  and  women  may  find  in  this 
challenge  to  living  not  only  an  obligation  but  a 
reinforcement  of  life.  Romain  Rolland  has 
written  of  the  “men  and  women  who,  through 
a  dull,  drab  life,  think  grave  thoughts  and  live 
in  daily  sacrifice.”6  It  is  the  common  expe¬ 
rience  captured  in  a  phrase.  But  this  venture 
of  life  upon  the  truths  which  lie  at  the  heart  of 
Christianity,  this  staking  actual  life  upon  the 
data  of  the  supernatural,  brings  with  it  at  once 
illumination  and  sustaining  power.  From  a 
home  melodious  with  children’s  laughter  and 
rich  with  domestic  fellowships,  one  by  one  the 
sons  and  daughters  have  gone  the  ways  of 
youth;  and  in  their  place  is  a  new  and  inextin¬ 
guishable  loneliness.  With  the  world  clamoring 
for  workmen  and  the  products  of  labor,  some 
maladjustment  of  industrial  affairs  prevents 
employment,  and  the  bread-and-butter  question 
becomes  bitterly  acute.  After  the  long  and 
arid  business  depression,  the  needless  perver¬ 
sities  of  men  and  the  injustices  of  events  and 
issues  still  multiply,  until  courage  and  optimism 
and  the  spirit  of  tolerance  threaten  to  break 
beneath  the  constant  strain.  Death,  with  the 
hideous  imaginations  it  awakens,  and  the 
haunting  memories  it  invites,  and  the  hope- 


6  Rolland,  Jean  Christophe,  vol.  ii,  p.  321.  Henry  Holt  &  Company. 

141 


AN  ADVENTURE  IN  ORTHODOXY 

lessness  of  grief  it  leaves,  invades  the  fireside, 
and  life  walks  softly  with  its  heartbreak. 
These  are  the  commonplaces.  In  them  is  the 
opportunity  and  obligation  of  living  actually 
upon  the  truths  of  Christ  and  the  Christlike 
God  until,  from  the  lives  of  multitudes  who 
make  the  common  Christian  experience  a 
conquering  creed  shall  be  written  in  terms  our 
turbulent  but  questing  age  shall  understand 
and  accept.  This  means  that  lives  thus  lived 
in  the  adventure  of  all  of  them  upon  the 
theology  they  confess  are  the  highways  upon 
which  God  moves.  It  means  that  underneath  the 
injustices  and  the  machineries  of  industry,  the 
disclosures  of  science,  the  social  revolutions 
which  make  and  distract  our  day,  the  immanent 
spirit  of  God  is  laboring,  in  the  democracy  of 
the  incarnation  which  Christ  reveals,  for  the 
world  of  righteousness  which  is  to  be.  It 
means  that  through  men’s  rectitude  and 
patience  in  struggle,  their  difficulties  honestly 
met,  theft*  loneliness  with  its  disciplines  of 
strength,  their  sorrow  from  which  all  bitterness 
is  excluded,  their  endurances  in  which  hope 
triumphs  over  resignation,  God  is  surely  accom¬ 
plishing  his  kingdom  of  justice,  love,  and  peace. 
In  all  these  enterprises  of  renunciation,  work, 
and  purpose  men  are  not  simply  the  victims 
of  the  reaction  of  war,  or  participants  in  the 

142 


THROUGH  CREDENCE  TO  CREED 


ills  to  which  the  flesh  is  heir;  they  are  laborers 
together  with  God.  They  are  making  the 
creed  which  other  men  will  some  day  write 
and  read.  But  it  is  not  the  creed  in  which 
they  first  believe;  it  is  God. 


143 


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